Julian Gough essay here on Divine Comedy that disapproves of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (Gutenberg etext, if you’ve never read it or have a mind to) and the ensuing “Werther Fever”:
Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, with its revoltingly sentimental suicide note, depressed a generation and caused a wave of fashionable suicides [...]
The Virginia Quarterly Review has Campbell’s entire essay The Accidental Plagiarist: The Trouble with Originality online. Many footnotes, many of them very funny. Like Lethem’s essay, some serve to credit the “original” source from which Campbell appropriated. (Note: Lethem’s were not some, but all; see entry Stitched, quilted, pastiched, erased? for more info and links.) [...]
I got this (Fence) book, Not For Mothers Only, Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting and Child-Rearing (editors, Catherine Wagner and Rebecca Wolff) for, not surprisingly, Mother’s Day. But more on that later. The back cover shows (but in color) a piece of Gilian Conoly’s erasures, “from Mr. B’s Poof and Dare,” made from a copy of [...]
Recently, I got a flute that I’m going to learn to play. I had piano lessons when I was very young and then played the clarinet for many years. My parents chose the instrument for me; I wasn’t very happy about playing it (I wanted to play the flute!); the summer of my fifth grade [...]
From You Must Revise Your Life (The University of Michigan Press, 1986) and as regards his poem “Yellow Cars”:
Yellow is the color for many reasons — the sun, gold, light, spring flowers. But I do not make the choice by realizing the literary or worldly justifications for my choice, but by making my choice from [...]
Everyone is writing a memoir it seems. I am not, or I don’t want to be. I want to set this tale in fiction, a fictional landscape, time and place. Fictional characters. The lie that tells the truth truer. This is the rambling beginning. The warm up. Clearing my throat. I am waiting for the [...]
…delightfully rambling [and thoughtful!] and I’ll take it, and say thanks for the notice. The local LitChick blog is One book lover’s take on what’s between the pages, the one book lover is Sara Pearce, writing about area and regional authors, and providing observations on the local literary scene. And more. Check it out.
Also, an [...]
The “cruellest” month, National Anxiety Month, Cesarean Awareness Month, all done for another year.
It was a spectacular weekend, rains ended, temperatures raised. We drove to Yellow Springs for the Artists Studio Tour, thereby giving me more practice in the art of rationalizing to deal with the bad feelings (guilt) I experience over driving. Along the [...]