A blog about the intersection of books and life.
Regardless of her putative subject, Stevie Smith always seems to get around to death. That sounds like a prescription for adolescent morbidity, like a low-budget horror movie. There’s a theory going around, probably rooted in Freudian quackery, that all artistic creation is about death or its denial. Yet, somehow – often formally, with her nursery rhymes and rhythms – Smith charms and amuses us.…
We’ve had a damp spring and summer in Houston – thirty-nine inches of rain since the start of the year. No major storms but frequent brief showers, often in late afternoon. At this time nine years ago, Hurricane Harvey was about to hit, flooding my car and leaving us without power for four days. Lawns now are lush. Mosquitoes swarm in clouds. Step outside and get sucker-punched by the humidity.…
The new century -- no longer new -- has been insatiably consuming good writers. In the early years of the twenty-first we endured a rough patch. In a five-year span we lost Anthony Powell, Edgar Bowers, William Maxwell, W.G. Sebald, R.S. Thomas, Penelope Fitzgerald, C.H. Sisson, Eudora Welty, D.J. Enright, Herbert Morris, Anthony Hecht, Thom Gunn, Donald Justice, Czesław Miłosz, Saul Bellow, Guy…
Welcome news is so rare in our withered literary culture, we are obligated to celebrate good new work when we encounter it. The summer 2026 issue of New Verse Review has been published, and it includes work by several of our finest established poets, as well as poems by newcomers worth reading. You’ll find three epigrams by R.L. Barth , including “McNamara’s 100,000”: “Moronic? Bumbling? Drooling?…
The Night of the Murdered Poets took place on August 12, 1952. Thirteen literary and intellectual figures were murdered on Stalin’s orders in the basement of Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Four were poets who wrote in Yiddish – Perets Markish , Leyb Kvitko, Dovid Hofshteyn, and Itsik Feffer -- and a fifth, David Bergelson, was a Yiddish novelist. All were Jews – “rootless cosmopolitans,” to use…
Yet another unfamiliar word I would like to see revived: gasconade . Dr. Johnson gives a typically terse definition : “a boast; a bravado.” He cites the letter Jonathan Swift wrote to Alexander Pope in which I encountered the word this week: “Was it a gasconade to please me, that you said your fortune was increased to one hundred a year since I left you?” As a noun, the word entered English from…
The only summer mornings we woke up and got dressed early was garbage collection day. We had to beat the trash men. This was long before recycling came into fashion. Everything went into the fluted metal trash cans. Larger objects were piled beside them. Once we found an oversized television set which we carried away in a wagon, hauled deep into the woods, lugged across the creek and up the hill…
“[T]here is, perhaps, a special pleasure in re-learning the names of many of the flowers every spring. It is like re-reading a book that one has almost forgotten. Montaigne tells us that he had so bad a memory that he could always read an old book as though he had never read it before.” The Irish critic Robert Lynd (1879-1949) is writing in the title essay of his 1921 collection The Pleasures of…
Literature is a hobby, and not. It is an academic discipline, and not. It is a diversion, a distraction, an escape. But some of us can’t imagine a well-lived life without it. There’s a lot of talk about books being good for us, making us better, more empathetic people, all of which may be true but that’s not why I read. If I were asked for a definitive explanation, I would be lost. In part it’s…
The medical technician performing the echocardiogram asked me to lie on my side, not “dorsally.” I thought first of the triangular fin on the back of a porpoise. Then I thought of Nabokov’s 1966 interview with Alfred J. Appel , who asks, “Do you think literary criticism is at all purposeful, and if so, what kind of criticism would you point to?” He replies: “My advice to a budding literary critic…
“It is only about the contents of a book that I care, not its shape, its date, or the number on its flyleaves.” Spoken like a reader, not a parvenu accumulating vogueish titles as though they were bowling trophies. Books as fashion statement or evidence of “interleckchul” (Flannery O’Connor’s spelling) status are comically pretentious. Aldous Huxley published his essay “If My Library Burned…
On the morning of August 5, 1763, Dr. Johnson accompanied Boswell on the stage-coach that would carry him to the port of Harwich. Then twenty-two, Boswell would be taking the packet-boat to Utrecht in the Netherlands, where he would study law. The two men – Johnson was fifty-three – had met less than three months earlier. Johnson would never have children of his own but already he had developed a…
“Some day I shall compile an Oxford Book of Depressing Verse , which shall contain nothing but the most magnificent expressions of melancholy and despair.” I’ve never spent much time reading Aldous Huxley – Brave New World in junior-high school, Crome Yellow a little later, then, inevitably, The Doors of Perception, when it was a cult book for many of my generation. I remember almost nothing about…
What has disappeared? Ambrose Bierce, Weldon Kees, Jimmy Hoffa. Aristotle’s second book of Poetics , three-decker novels, rhupunts. Typewriters, payphones, civility. In his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940; trans. James E. Irby, 1961), Jorge Luis Borges describes a fanciful world of radically subjective idealism, as premised by Bishop Berkeley. “Things become duplicated in Tlön,” he…
Too often style is judged filigree applied after the house is built. It’s cosmetic, inessential to the building’s structural integrity. Can a poor or indifferent stylist be judged a good or great writer? An obvious test-case is Theodore Dreiser. His Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy are powerful stories clumsily told. I can’t imagine rereading either novel but scenes stick with me after…
Eccentricity in books is a tricky quality. It can be charming and inspire lifelong devotion. Take Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy , a book I discovered in my freshman year. I redundantly keep three copies on the shelves nearest my desk. Tristram Shandy is another endlessly readable eccentricity. Among the less successful are Ronald Firbank’s novels, which I have tried hard to love for…
It was April or early May and the snow was going or gone. A low wall of fieldstones surrounded the cemetery in Schoharie County, N.Y. – one of those artfully assembled walls that last for centuries in the Northeast. Jack Flavin writes of them in his poem “In a Country Cemetery” : “The patient art (that conceals art) of the country mason who built this wall is a silent rebuke to some of the…
On July 30, 1937, the NKVD issued Order No. 00447, signed by Stalin and NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov, which mandated the round-up of “ex-kulaks” and other “anti-Soviet elements,” including former officials of the Tsarist regime and former members of political parties other than the Communist Party. Local police officials competed to exceed the official quotas. This was the formal start of “The Great…
“In time we bow / To the necessity and claim profound / Returns in memory.” The spice cupboard was a disorganized mess. Looking for tarragon turned into an expedition. I wiped the shelf where seasonings had spilled and what did I smell? Cloves. Then it was 1961 and I was greeting my maternal grandmother at the front door. Her fur coat was cold. With the hug I reached for her purse of black patent…
Zbigniew Herbert begins his 1966 essay “Monsieur Montaigne’s Voyage to Italy” with these words: “When a moment comes that my body will have only enough strength to fix the pillow under the head, I will have no choice but write a large piece of work, that is a book and not a collection of drafts, which will be titled: Introduction to the theory of journey.” Travel is especially prized by those…
“It’s not a showy word but a worker word, a syntactic functionary; and yet, for all its organizational aplomb, it secretly delights in nuance and ambiguity.” The poet and Islamic scholar Eric Ormsby is a voluptuary of language. He revels in words like a kid does ice cream. Ormsby took part in a parlor game, “One Word,” sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. Simple: pick a favorite word. In…
Jules Renard writes in his journal on July 26, 1899: “More than once I have tried being morose for a whole day. I have not succeeded. Not even that!” Renard enjoys presenting himself as a nebbish, a bungler who fails at everything. It’s a useful persona that induces sympathy in the reader and mutes egotism, permitting him to announce his buoyancy of personality while not overtly bragging. Dr.…
“Do you ever feel that you spend too much time with books?” The answer true to the spirit of the age would be to respond in the positive and ’fess up to the years wasted, money lost, opportunities missed, relationships scuttled, life in general squandered. That would earn me sympathetic murmurs and pats on the shoulder from my fellow addicts, gathered here in a church basement. (“I can quit…
“Feeling admiration for someone is a privilege that becomes a calamity when the person we admire dies.” With age, such calamities proliferate. We start accumulating meaningful deaths. I don’t recall many, except JFK’s, having much impact on me when I was a kid. One measure of maturity may be periodically adding to the list of those we admire, whose departure leaves us grieving. Someone too cool or…
I sensed in Jane Greer, even through the unreliable conduit of the internet, an ebullient spirit utterly unlike myself, which is why I felt an immediate attraction to her and her excellent poetry. On New Year’s Eve 2024, Jane wrote to me: “Do come to North Dakota! It’s beautiful—7 months out of the year.” She enjoyed laughing. She must have been a fine hostess. She saw the good in people that I…