Literature
The Trueness of Beauty
Neither audience nor artist should approach art as self-expression. To do so robs art of its universal applicability. If James Joyce had written strictly to see himself on paper, A...
Other Post
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Cormac McCarthy at Christmas
December 26, 2012 -
Stories for Social Change in "Flight Behavior" & "The Line"
December 24, 2012 -
This Baffled Dance: Amy Leach's "Things That Are"
December 10, 2012 -
Chimneys Dark & Spirits Bright
December 06, 2012 -
Shire Reckonings
October 17, 2012 -
Real Life in Mumbai: Behind the Beautiful Forevers
October 15, 2012
Three Sorrows
Seen from one perspective, the Twentieth Century was not a pretty period: a long chain of wars, recessions, genocides, sex scandals, drugs.... The Twenty-first is not at present looking much better: 9-11, wars, recessions, genocides, sex scandals, drugs; not even much good rock-n-roll. The achievements of the past 111 years pale against the lurid colors of human suffering. Meanwhile, has painting recovered from Pollo...
Weathering the Books
If this were Facebook, you’d read that “Rebecca Martin is happy Agatha Christie was so prolific.” Summer is for detective stories. Every year, just about the same time, the air gets hot, the trees turn green, this college town gets quiet, and Arthur Conan Doyle comes through. Dorothy Sayers as well. And, thanks to the productive industriousness of one Agatha Christie, Poirot and Miss Marple for many summers to ...
Stealing Norton: Do You Work at Your Art?
It starts after dinner, when I share a poem called, “One Art.” I began reading poems after dinner when my husband’s job changed, and he started working late, and we felt the loss of him at our table. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” says Elizabeth Bishop’s poem. The statement is so stark. Is she really serious? Can she be that immune as to continue, “so many things seem filled with the int...
There and Back Again
We humans make sense of our lives by shaping them into narratives. Childhood is the exposition; romances, tragedies, and accomplishments soar up the slope of conflict to peak at the crisis of marriage, death, divorce, a degree, promotion, or publication. We organize little experiences like short stories: beginning, middle, end. Maybe this is why fiction is addictive: each new beach novel or young adult fantasy offers...
A Passion for the Possible
I spend a lot of time listening to music and reading at the same time. I’m not proud of this behavior—I end up giving neither music nor book the attention it deserves—but I have an excuse: my downstairs neighbors are beginning violin students. Given the choice between being distracted by a squeaky rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” or Mark O’Connor’s “Appalachia Waltz,” I choose the professi...
Choose Your Words
One of the most striking tiny details in Madeleine L'Engle's bracing and beautiful memoir, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage, is L'Engle's habit of swimming for half an hour before breakfast while internally reciting an "alphabet" of verses: The movement of the body through water helps mind and heart to work together . . . It is a good way of timing my swimming and by holding on to the great affirmation...
You Write Like a Girl
Is there such a thing as writing “like a woman” or writing “like a man”? Virginia Woolf asked this question in 1929. Book critic Francine Prose asked it again in 1998. Novelist V.S. Naipaul answered it in 2011, when he declared, “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.” He went on to say that women writers were “unequ...
