Arrested Not at Home But in the Street

"M. immediately decided that nobody was more important than Dante, and regarded him as an inseparable companion ever afterward—even twice taking him to prison with him. Anticipating his arrest—as I have already said, everybody we knew did this as a matter of course—M. obtained an edition of the Divine Comedy in small format and always had it with him in his pocket, just in case he was arrested not at home but in the street."  "M." is Osip Mandelstam, as his widow Nadezhda refers to him in ...

Book wars. “What happens when the oldest of our media industries collides with the great technological revolution of our time?”

IN 1995, I WENT to work as a writer and editor for Book World , the then-standalone book-review section of The Washington Post . I left a decade later, two years before Amazon released the Kindle ebook reader. By then, mainstream news outlets like the Post were on the ropes, battered by what sociologist John B. Thompson, in Book Wars , calls "the digital revolution" and its erosion of print subscriptions and advertising revenue. The idea that...

The Painful Cost of the Writing Life

At the time of my first novel’s death, I had written fewer than twenty new pages, best characterized as a project rather than a novel. I was twenty-​nine years old, hardly ancient, but I had been writing fiction since I was sixteen. Thirteen years is either a lot of time to throw away to pursue a new career, or a lot of time to be doing something and not yet know what you’re doing. I was haunted by the voice of an award-​winning writer in graduate school who described one of my short stori...

Weekend links 584

Cover for the 1970 US edition of Moonchild by Aleister Crowley. No artist credited (unless you know better…). Update: The artist is Dugald Stewart Walker, and the drawing is from a 1914 edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. Thanks to Mr TjZ! • "…a very mid-Seventies cauldron of Cold War technology, ESP, sociology, black magic and white magic, experimental science and standing stones, secret radar and satanic rituals, whirring aerials and wild moors: a seething potion of Wyndha...

A Summary and Analysis of the Diana and Actaeon Myth

The story of Diana and Actaeon and his band of hounds is a well-known tale from classical myth, especially thanks to Ovid, who included the story in his great anthology of myths involving transformations of various kinds, the Metamorphoses.But who was Diana, and who was Actaeon? Before we analyse this famous myth, it might be worth summarising its key details …Summary of the myth of Diana and ActaeonActaeon was a youth who was raised by a centaur, Chiron, who taught him how to hunt. Centaurs ...

A Summary and Analysis of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre

Here’s a seemingly uncontroversial statement: in 1847, a novel called Jane Eyre was published; the author was Charlotte Brontë. One of the most famous things about Jane Eyre is that the male love interest, Mr Rochester, has locked his first wife, Bertha Mason, in the attic of his house. Whilst this statement is fine as far as it goes, there are several things we might question about it. But we’ll come to those in our textual analysis of the novel. First, let’s briefly summarise the plot...

A Summary and Analysis of the Book of Ruth

The Book of Ruth is one of the shorter books of the Bible, but the story it tells is one of the most movingly ‘human’ in all of the Old Testament. However, how the story of Ruth should be interpreted is not an easy question to answer. Let’s delve deeper into the Biblical Book of Ruth to discover a world of outsiders, love, law, and mysterious customs involving shoes. Before we come to the analysis, though, it might be worth summarising the plot of the story of Ruth as it’s laid out in t...

Bonus Episode Sacred and Profane Love: Matthew Mehan on Children’s Literature

[link ] Sometimes, you just need to do something fun, and this episode reflects one of those times. I was in DC this summer for a week teaching, so I popped into the Hillsdale College recording studio (where I’ve been before to chat Walker Percy) to talk with one of my favorite children’s lit authors, Matthew Mehan. We discuss children’s lit generally and also discuss his own books (which I highly recommend!): The Handsome Little Cygnet and Mr. Mehan’s Mildly Amusing Mythical ...

How to Read Any Book as a Sacred Text

Book Dreams is a podcast for everyone who loves books and misses English class. Co-hosted by Julie Sternberg and Eve Yohalem, Book Dreams releases new episodes every Thursday. Each episode explores book-related topics you can’t stop thinking about—whether you know it yet or not. Vanessa Zoltan, author of the recently published Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice, is not your usual chaplain. She is an atheist who produces podcasts about treating Harry Potter,...

The Importance of Being Earnest

Introduction to The Importance of Being Earnest The Importance of Being Earnest is a play. It was previously titled A Trivial Comedy for Serious People written by the popular British playwright and author, Oscar Wilde. It was first staged in London on 14 February 1895, setting a benchmark for a new breed of popular comedies of those times. The story of the play works within the social conventions of Victorian London and shows the protagonists establishing fictitious personalities to avoid ...

Intertextuality: Hollywood's New Emotional Currency? [Video Essay]

Home Featured Reviews Trailers /Answers /Filmcast /Film Daily Podcast 2' Advertisement Intertextuality: Hollywood’s New Emotional Currency? [Video Essay] Posted on Thursday, May 26th, 2016 by Peter Sciretta The Nerdwriter’s latest video "Intertextuality: Hollywood’s New Currency" takes a look at how Hollywood is using our nostalgia to play with our emotions in sequels, remakes and even original movies. Inspired...

Against the Literature of Silence: Richard Flanagan on the Writer’s Freedom to Embrace Heresy

It is strange to have as my subject freedom to write coming from an island which, for a quarter of its modern history, was a slave society. Though there were major differences, the literature of the era abounds with comparisons between the convict society of Van Diemen’s Land and the slave societies of the Americas. My forebears were transported as convicts from Ireland, frequently in the same ships and similar conditions to those which had transported Africans into American slavery, now p...

Reloading the Canon

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Curious Meaning of Juliet’s O Romeo, Romeo, Wherefore Art Thou Romeo

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the meaning of a strange Shakespearean quotation Let’s start with two correctives to common misconceptions about Romeo and Juliet. First of all, when Juliet asks her star-cross’d lover, ‘O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ she isn’t, of course, asking him where he is. ‘Wherefore’ means ‘why’: ‘the whys and the wherefores’ is a tautological phrase, since whys and wherefores are the same. (If we wish...

Kinds of writing (guest post by Kwame Anthony Appiah)

This is a guest post by Kwame Anthony Appiah (New York University) on reading and writing fiction, for a series of blogposts we are hosting on philosophers who write fiction or poetry (see here for an earlier installment).My mother was an artist who became a writer because she found that it was easier, while raising children, to compose fiction than to paint. (A brief teenage conversation with my mother: "Mummy, why did you stop painting?" "You were born." Guilty silence.) The first draft of ...

1 john 1:1-4 [the word of life] | BibleDude.life

U aa M 1 john 1:1-4 [the word of life] Written by Leslie Rowe Owner/writer at Greatwords.net. Penn State alum. Religious views: for. Political vi...

The Metamorphosis

Introduction of The MetamorphosisMetamorphosis was originally published in the German language as Die Verwandlung and later translated into English. It is a popular novelette written by Franz Kafka. It was first published in 1915 and immediately created an uproar in the literary circles. Later, it was translated into several other languages, after which it became a foundation for writing about/on the grotesque and psychological issues. The story, though, revolves around a poor salesman and hi...

Aimé Césaire (person) by Gethsemane - Everything2.com

Near Matches Ignore ExactFull Text Everything2 Aimé Césaire (person) See all of Aimé Césaire, no other writeups in this node. (person) by Gethsemane Thu Aug 31 2000 at 9:05:01 "Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge." Aimé Césaire (b. 1913 in Martinique) is amongst the foremost poets of the Caribbean. He studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was a progenitor, with Léon Gontran-Damas and Léopold Senghor, of the notion of Négri...

The Sky Was Blue the Sea Was Blue and the Boy Was Blue review – a monochrome marvel

The Sky Was Blue the Sea Was Blue and the Boy Was Blue review – a monochrome marvel The Guardian - Back to homeContribute Sign inNewsOpinionSportCultureLifestyleShow MoreFilmBooksMusicArt & designTV & radioStageClassicalGamesLockdown cultureThe Sky Was Blue the Sea Was Blue and the Boy Was Blue review – a monochrome marvel Victoria Miro, London; online on Vortic Collect from TuesdayCobalt, indigo, ultramarine; the colour of sadness and a summer’s day… in this uplifting virtual sh...

nestor - Everything2.com

Near Matches Ignore ExactFull Text Everything2 nestor ("nestor" is also a: user.) (idea) by Hooverdirt Tue Feb 27 2001 at 16:16:59 Nestor - 'Ulysses' - James Joyce Time: 9-10 am Scene: 'The School' Persons: Stephen - Telemachus Deasy - Antinous Sargent - Pisistratus Mrs. O'Shea - Helen Symbol:: -- No symbol yet. Telemachus has no body yet! Art/Science: HISTORY As in Nestor's love for horses, Deasy has the same affection for them too. Also, while Nestor 'boasts' about th...

Tyro (thing) by chromaticblue - Everything2.com

Near Matches Ignore ExactFull Text Everything2 Tyro (thing) See all of Tyro, there is 1 more in this node. (thing) by chromaticblue Mon Jan 01 2001 at 3:21:57 Tyro was the daughter of Salmoneus, the wife of Cretheus, and and the mother (by Poseidon) of Pelias and Neleus. The Genealogy of Tyro: Deucalion | Hellen | Aeolus | ...

Promethean Women

Promethean WomenMiranda Seymour Both Mary Wollstonecraft, darling of twentieth-century feminists, and her visionary daughter Mary Shelley continue to influence us today. February 25, 2021 issueSubmit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.comReviewed: Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics by Sylvana Tomaselli Princeton University Press, 230 pp., $29.95 Artificial Life After Frankenstein by Eileen Hunt Botting University of Pennsylvania Press, 258 pp., $34.95 Frankenstein: The 1818 Edi...

Harry You Must Stop Living in the Past - Names as Acts of Recall in John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom

Sergeant Salinger

Artbreak - an incomplete scheme of liaisons, alliances, marriages and affairs between twentieth century artists