No pictures
A perfect example of administrative overreaction fueled by fear and ignorance.
Literature clock
I would like to know if it has 5:15 a.m., but I wouldn’t want to have to get up that early to find out.
Soaking up lit
Nicholson Baker and Virgil Partch.
Literary dust
Can you think of a work of literature in English in which dust plays a significant part?
The Write Stuff
From BBC Radio 4, The Write Stuff, “the radio panel game of literary correctness.”
Rita Felski on “critique”
“Its conception of the uses and values of literature is simply too thin.”
From an old notebook
Alfred Appel Jr.: “The great popularity of this show suggests there is a kind of exit poll being taken at the end of the 20th century, and the vote is in favor of eros over thanatos. Matisse is everyone’s person for celebrating the simple things that all the wars and disasters of the 20th century have not obliterated from the lives of ordinary people.”
From One of Ours
The meaning of “literature.”
Evangeline and me
What would you regard as the strangest or most inappropriate or most sadly dated assigned reading of your elementary or high-school education?
Literature and choreography
The choreographer and movement director Steven Hoggett talks with Helen Zaltzman about what studying literature has meant to his work.
Gary Saul Morson on English studies
Morson suggests that academics kill interest in literature. I think he’s on the mark.
M. H. Abrams (1912–2015)
With a diagram that has been the starting point for who knows how many expeditions into the world of criticism.
Hoagies, pizzas, and English studies
One reason for the general collapse of English studies in recent years is, I believe, the tacit, never argued-for assumption that Baker’s position is the correct one, that it is inappropriate to deem some works more deserving of attention than others, that all cultural productions are worthy material for the mill of critical practice.
Moby-Dick at Harvard
“It’s sad to think of the faux mastery that passes for English studies in this account, and impossible to imagine playing the game, as student or teacher, without losing all intellectual self-respect.”
Five more punctuation marks in literature
/, ’, . . . ., !. ,.
Five punctuation marks in literature
:, ;, ., —, ——.
Literature and reverence
From Diana Senechal’s Republic of Noise.
Literature and word-processing
From the New York Times: “Jimmy Carter set off what may have been the first word-processing-related panic in 1981, when he accidently deleted several pages of his memoir in progress by hitting the wrong keys on his brand-new $12,000 Lanier.”
Treasures of the Bodleian
An online exhibit, an excellent rabbit-hole.
Frank Kermode (1919–2010)
Excerpt from The Sense of an Ending (1967)
"[S]ought for smell for dust for lace"
A Gregory Corso poem
Quimby economics
Ramona Quimby speaks for us all: "We are scrimping and pinching to make ends meet."
Beyond categories
Resisting them in literature and music
Product placement in tween lit
To add authenticity, of course.
Richard Rorty on the value of literature
The inspirational value Rorty claims for literature lies in its capacity to "make people think there is more to this life than they ever ima...