Anecdotal Evidence

'To Build a House for Fools and Mad' An entry dated June 15, 1830 in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Table Talk: “[Jonathan, not Taylor]...

8 months ago

78

'To Build a House for Fools and Mad'

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8 months ago

An entry dated June 15, 1830 in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Table Talk: “[Jonathan, not Taylor] Swift was anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco,--the soul of Rabelais dwelling in a dry place. Yet Swift was rare.” Now there’s a metaphor that sticks in the mind – “dwelling in a dry...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Such a Touchy, Testy, Pleasant Fellow' One of the curses of a good memory is the inability to forget stupid, hurtful things we said in the...

8 months ago

78

'Such a Touchy, Testy, Pleasant Fellow'

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8 months ago

One of the curses of a good memory is the inability to forget stupid, hurtful things we said in the past, and sometimes last week. Years ago I wrecked a friendship with a glib remark, a wisecrack that I didn’t even believe but had convinced myself was funny (it was, in fact, but...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Daft in a Socially Useful and Quite Pleasant Way' A young man and his friend wish to open a bookstore and I'm reluctant to say anything to discourage...

8 months ago

76

'Daft in a Socially Useful and Quite Pleasant Way'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

A young man and his friend wish to open a bookstore and I'm reluctant to say anything to discourage them. Nor do I want to encourage costly foolishness. He’s twenty-one, my age when I indulged in a similar fantasy half a century ago. With a poet and his wife – hardly the most...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'It Is Wonderful to Be a Writer' I met the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld in 1987 on the same day I met Raul Hilberg and Cynthia...

9 months ago

76

'It Is Wonderful to Be a Writer'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

I met the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld in 1987 on the same day I met Raul Hilberg and Cynthia Ozick. I had read Appelfeld’s first novel, Badenheim 1939 (1978; trans. 1980), several years earlier and found it disturbing in a novel way. The action takes place on the cusp of...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Some Godforsaken Province' After the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, the poet Aleksander Wat fled to Lwów, already occupied by...

8 months ago

75

'Some Godforsaken Province'

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8 months ago

After the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, the poet Aleksander Wat fled to Lwów, already occupied by the Soviets. He was arrested by the NKVD the following year and held in a military prison in that city, then moved to Kiev, the Lubyanka in Moscow, and Saratov, more than...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Being Vulnerable to History' I read Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer when it was published in 1966. Readers often turn...

7 months ago

75

'Being Vulnerable to History'

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7 months ago

I read Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer when it was published in 1966. Readers often turn melodramatic when describing the impact a book has had on them – “life-changing,” that sort of thing. Such claims usually can be chalked up to enthusiasm untempered by critical rigor. The...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'That Judgment Day of Man’s Illusions' In 1956, The American Scholar asked forty-three writers, critics and scholars to name the book...

8 months ago

73

'That Judgment Day of Man’s Illusions'

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8 months ago

In 1956, The American Scholar asked forty-three writers, critics and scholars to name the book published in the preceding twenty-five years they believed to have been “the most undeservedly neglected.” For this reader, sorry to say, most of them remain neglected. I don’t even...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'I Was Only Coming True' In the final year of his life, Clive James published a book-length poem, The River in the Sky...

a year ago

72

'I Was Only Coming True'

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a year ago

In the final year of his life, Clive James published a book-length poem, The River in the Sky (2018), a dying man’s last fling. The title refers to the Japanese phrase for the Milky Way. It’s mostly autobiography, a book of well-rehearsed memories, largely unstructured, much of...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Bright Books! the Perspectives to Our Weak Sights' April is the kindest and cruelest month. Think of the births: George Herbert (April 3, 1593),...

9 months ago

71

'Bright Books! the Perspectives to Our Weak Sights'

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9 months ago

April is the kindest and cruelest month. Think of the births: George Herbert (April 3, 1593), Shakespeare (April 23, 1564), Henry Vaughan (April 17, 1621), Daniel Defoe (April 24, 1731), Edward Gibbon (April 27, 1737), William Hazlitt (April 10, 1778), Anthony Trollope (April...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Relief, Joy, or Nostalgia' “Of course, no one simply reads, or rereads, a given book. One reads a certain edition at a specific...

9 months ago

70

'Relief, Joy, or Nostalgia'

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9 months ago

“Of course, no one simply reads, or rereads, a given book. One reads a certain edition at a specific time in one’s life, and the particular book’s smell, typeface, and paper can be as much a part of the experience as one’s physical and emotional circumstances.” I used to think...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'I Like to Think of Pasteur in Elysium' In 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo, the scholar and...

8 months ago

70

'I Like to Think of Pasteur in Elysium'

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8 months ago

In 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary by the Politburo, the scholar and translator Clarence Brown published The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader, a selection ranging from Tolstoy and Chekhov to Voinovich and Sokolov. In the introduction he...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'An Impetuous Eagerness to Subvert' Dr. Johnson describes the poet and physician Mark Akenside: “He certainly retained an unnecessary...

7 months ago

69

'An Impetuous Eagerness to Subvert'

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7 months ago

Dr. Johnson describes the poet and physician Mark Akenside: “He certainly retained an unnecessary and outrageous zeal for what he called and thought liberty; a zeal which sometimes disguises from the world, and not rarely from the mind which it possesses, an envious desire of...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Dark But Festive' I grew up in the Age of Magazines. My parents, who were not book readers, subscribed at various...

8 months ago

69

'Dark But Festive'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

I grew up in the Age of Magazines. My parents, who were not book readers, subscribed at various times to Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, Time, Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post and National Geographic, not to mention those periodicals subscribed to by my mother (McCall’s,...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'It Is a Rite of Finitude' Most of Richard Wilbur’s poetry I read retrospectively, in books, long after it was written and...

8 months ago

69

'It Is a Rite of Finitude'

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8 months ago

Most of Richard Wilbur’s poetry I read retrospectively, in books, long after it was written and first published in magazines. One exception I remember is “All That Is,” which appeared in the May 13, 1985 issue of The New Yorker. I had mostly stopped reading the magazine by...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Vacuum with American Light' Edward Hopper is often a favorite painter of literary-minded people because, I suspect, so many of...

8 months ago

69

'The Vacuum with American Light'

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8 months ago

Edward Hopper is often a favorite painter of literary-minded people because, I suspect, so many of his works suggest in-media-res excerpts from larger narratives. Looking as his paintings is like opening a novel to a memorable scene, without access to backstory or subsequent...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Pure Essay' “A good deal that he wrote took the form of the ‘pure’ essay, written, as Lord David Cecil says,...

8 months ago

68

'The Pure Essay'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

“A good deal that he wrote took the form of the ‘pure’ essay, written, as Lord David Cecil says, ‘not to instruct or edify but only to produce aesthetic satisfaction.’ I do not know why it should be so, but today the ‘pure’ essay is a literary genre to which no reader under sixty...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'For Grief and Lost Belief' In the U.S., Memorial Day is observed on the final Monday in May – this year, May 27....

8 months ago

68

'For Grief and Lost Belief'

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8 months ago

In the U.S., Memorial Day is observed on the final Monday in May – this year, May 27. Formerly called Decoration Day, it started after the Civil War as commemoration of the nation’s war dead. The meaning and observance of holidays tend to dilute with time. When I was a boy, the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'One Thing Always to Be Guarded Against' “Poetry, geography, moral essays, the divers [sic] subjects of philosophy, travels, natural history,...

7 months ago

68

'One Thing Always to Be Guarded Against'

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7 months ago

“Poetry, geography, moral essays, the divers [sic] subjects of philosophy, travels, natural history, books on sciences; and, in short, the whole range of book-knowledge is before you; but there is one thing always to be guarded against; and that is, not to admire and applaud...

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Anecdotal Evidence

‘A Pocket Universe’ We lost power again around noon Saturday. No idea when it will be restored. Here is “The Next Book,”...

8 months ago

68

‘A Pocket Universe’

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8 months ago

We lost power again around noon Saturday. No idea when it will be restored. Here is “The Next Book,” a 1969 poem by James Hayford (Star in the Shed Window: Collected Poems 1933-1988, New England Press, 1989): “May the next book you read Be what you need— “A pocket...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'It All But Lovely As Silence Is' Thanks to S.J. Perelman and his 1952 collection The Ill-Tempered Clavichord, I get confused with...

7 months ago

67

'It All But Lovely As Silence Is'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

Thanks to S.J. Perelman and his 1952 collection The Ill-Tempered Clavichord, I get confused with Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (1722) and with that bone that runs from the sternum to the shoulder blade. You know, the clavicle. Each time I need to cite one of the three, in writing...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Brave Respect the Brave' In observance of Memorial Day, R.L. Barth sent me a poem by Ambrose Bierce, one I had never read...

8 months ago

67

'The Brave Respect the Brave'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

In observance of Memorial Day, R.L. Barth sent me a poem by Ambrose Bierce, one I had never read before, “To E.S. Salomon” (Black Beetles in Amber, 1892). Here is the memorably pertinent third stanza: “The brave respect the brave. The brave Respect the dead; but you -- you...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Troublesome Error, a Pernicious Foppery'' Let’s be grateful to our troubled age for making it necessary to revive such formerly dormant words...

8 months ago

67

'A Troublesome Error, a Pernicious Foppery''

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

Let’s be grateful to our troubled age for making it necessary to revive such formerly dormant words as cant and foppery, so as to avoid the more precise but less polite bullshit. For foppery, the OED offers among its definitions “foolishness, imbecility, stupidity, folly.” It’s...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Midst the Pomp and Toil of War' I learned that General George S. Patton, Jr. wrote poetry from my father, a man who never read...

8 months ago

67

'Midst the Pomp and Toil of War'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

I learned that General George S. Patton, Jr. wrote poetry from my father, a man who never read poetry. I was a senior in high school. Days before we went to see the Oscar-winning film Patton, he delivered a lecture on the general’s military prowess, anti-Semitism and desire to...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'He Was Spared That Annoyance' As expected, Beryl made landfall near Matagorda early Monday as a Category 1 hurricane. Sustained...

6 months ago

67

'He Was Spared That Annoyance'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

As expected, Beryl made landfall near Matagorda early Monday as a Category 1 hurricane. Sustained winds hit 80 m.p.h. By 7 a.m. we could hear a hum like a dentist’s drill when the wind gusted. Trees fell and we watched water fill the street, top the curb and slosh on the lawn....

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Highest Kind of Verbal Exercise' John Updike published “Kenneths” in the July 5, 1958 issue of The New Yorker and collected it in his...

7 months ago

67

'The Highest Kind of Verbal Exercise'

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7 months ago

John Updike published “Kenneths” in the July 5, 1958 issue of The New Yorker and collected it in his second book of poems, Telephone Poles (1963): “Rexroth and Patchen and Fearing—their mothers Perhaps could distinguish their sons from the others, But I am unable. My inner eye...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Those Move Easiest Who Have Learn’d to Dance' Alexander Pope’s 1716 imitation of Martial’s epigram X.23: “At length, my Friend (while Time, with...

8 months ago

66

'Those Move Easiest Who Have Learn’d to Dance'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

Alexander Pope’s 1716 imitation of Martial’s epigram X.23: “At length, my Friend (while Time, with still career, Wafts on his gentle wing his eightieth year), Sees his past days safe out of Fortune’s power, Nor dreads approaching Fate’s uncertain hour; Reviews his life, and in...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Artist Knows He Is Ready' A young reader complains that he’s “good with words” but doesn’t know what to write about. It sounds...

8 months ago

66

'The Artist Knows He Is Ready'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

A young reader complains that he’s “good with words” but doesn’t know what to write about. It sounds as though he seizes up when he sits down at the keyboard. To call his condition “writer’s block” would be premature. He’s too inexperienced for that to be happening already. The...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Whole Sky Seems to Turn Into Rain' The storm was brief and fierce. Wind pushed the rain horizontally, like an airborne river. The tops...

8 months ago

66

'The Whole Sky Seems to Turn Into Rain'

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8 months ago

The storm was brief and fierce. Wind pushed the rain horizontally, like an airborne river. The tops of newly planted trees touched the ground. Yard and street filled with branches, leaves and pine cones. A block away, an oak cracked and fell, blocking the street. We lost power at...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Each Man Can Be Judged By His Favorite Books' This I find in The Lone Heretic: A Biography of Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1963) by Margaret Thomas...

7 months ago

65

'Each Man Can Be Judged By His Favorite Books'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

This I find in The Lone Heretic: A Biography of Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1963) by Margaret Thomas Rudd, who quotes her subject: “Each man can be judged by his favorite books.” She adds of the great Spanish thinker and novelist: “Throughout his long life Unamuno returned to...

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Anecdotal Evidence

‘Of Course’ “Auden says, Wordsworth says, Valery says, Shakespeare says. Always the present tense. Of...

8 months ago

65

‘Of Course’

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8 months ago

“Auden says, Wordsworth says, Valery says, Shakespeare says. Always the present tense. Of course.” —Geoffrey Grigson, The Private Art: A Poetry Notebook (Allison and Busby, 1982).

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Most Intense Enthusiasm for Good Literature' I was reading an interview with X.J. Kennedy when this line touched me unexpectedly: “He was, of all...

9 months ago

65

'The Most Intense Enthusiasm for Good Literature'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

I was reading an interview with X.J. Kennedy when this line touched me unexpectedly: “He was, of all the people I ever met, the one who had the most intense enthusiasm for good literature.” Spoken by another, this might amount to glibly rendered bullshit, the sort of thing junior...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'More Profundities Than Twists' I’m sure some of you share my slightly guilty impulse: a book last read months or decades ago enters...

6 months ago

65

'More Profundities Than Twists'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

I’m sure some of you share my slightly guilty impulse: a book last read months or decades ago enters my thoughts and I can’t shake it. I have to read it again. For me, the same is true of movies. To put it in not non-artistic terms, sometimes you get a craving for spaghetti...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'It Is Pure Absence, No Place, Nowhere, Not' I remember in high school reading Louis Fischer’s The Life of Lenin (1964), though all I retain of...

5 months ago

65

'It Is Pure Absence, No Place, Nowhere, Not'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

I remember in high school reading Louis Fischer’s The Life of Lenin (1964), though all I retain of the book is the account of Lenin’s autopsy, following his death at age fifty-two from atherosclerosis. When tapped with tweezers, his cerebral arteries pinged like stone. They...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'First Find a Thinking Being. Lots of Luck' As a non-mathematician, I’m more interested in the history of mathematics than in math itself....

8 months ago

65

'First Find a Thinking Being. Lots of Luck'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

As a non-mathematician, I’m more interested in the history of mathematics than in math itself. That’s a confession of inadequacy, though I’m not one of those people who says, “I don’t have a head for math,” when what they really mean is arithmetic. Because of my job I’ve learned...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'At the Center of Our Mediterranean Civilization' My youngest son, age twenty-one, is spending much of his summer in Paris as part of a university...

7 months ago

64

'At the Center of Our Mediterranean Civilization'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

My youngest son, age twenty-one, is spending much of his summer in Paris as part of a university study program. He’ll be a senior in the fall. I first visited Paris (and Europe) in 1973, age twenty, and stayed in a hotel on the Rue de Maubeuge, 10th arrondissement. Headlines in...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Kind of Masochism Afoot in Modern Aesthetics' “Is there a kind of masochism afoot in modern aesthetics whereby the leaden and the dull acquire...

6 months ago

64

'A Kind of Masochism Afoot in Modern Aesthetics'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

“Is there a kind of masochism afoot in modern aesthetics whereby the leaden and the dull acquire significance simply because the beaten spirit would seem to claim more seriousness than a more robust struggle with the exigencies of things?” This elegantly crafted question, at...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Twitter of Inconsequent Vitality' This week I will interview a professor of chemical engineering who is retiring after forty-four...

9 months ago

64

'A Twitter of Inconsequent Vitality'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

This week I will interview a professor of chemical engineering who is retiring after forty-four years on the faculty. He came to the university straight from earning his Ph.D. He’s neither flashy nor hungry for publicity, and I was surprised he agreed to speak with me. He has a...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Things That Pass' Among the books and magazines for sale in our neighborhood library I found the Winter 1985 issue of...

9 months ago

64

'The Things That Pass'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

Among the books and magazines for sale in our neighborhood library I found the Winter 1985 issue of The American Scholar, which I bought for a quarter. Joseph Epstein was still the editor. On Page 97 is a poem, “Old Man Sitting in a Shopping Mall,” by a writer whose name was...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'We Are All Potential Recruits for Anarchy' It’s an honor to be published in The New Criterion, a journal I started reading in 1986, four years...

8 months ago

63

'We Are All Potential Recruits for Anarchy'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

It’s an honor to be published in The New Criterion, a journal I started reading in 1986, four years after it was founded by the late Hilton Kramer and Samuel Lipman. To share pages in the June issue with Gary Saul Morson, Victor Davis Hanson and other gifted writers is...

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Anecdotal Evidence

"The Test of a Reader' “. . . to say a word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as I have called it,...

7 months ago

63

"The Test of a Reader'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

“. . . to say a word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment—a free grace, I find I must call it—by which a man rises to understand...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Mind Quite Vacant Is a Mind Distress’d' I’ll be going halftime at the university, effective July 1, in preparation for retiring later this...

7 months ago

63

'A Mind Quite Vacant Is a Mind Distress’d'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

I’ll be going halftime at the university, effective July 1, in preparation for retiring later this year. I knew a guy in high school who already yearned for retirement despite never having had a job, whereas I’d been working since I was twelve. He wanted to play golf and go...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'We Also Read for Ecstasy' A reader one-third of my age asks, “Why are books so important to you? What do they matter?” Her...

10 months ago

62

'We Also Read for Ecstasy'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

10 months ago

A reader one-third of my age asks, “Why are books so important to you? What do they matter?” Her questions aren’t cynical. She sounds like a reader driven by the sort of bookish hunger I recognize. Her tastes are eclectic, not confined strictly to the American or...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Let One Book Lead Him to Another' I have not run the analytics but I believe the Joseph Epstein essay with the longest shelf life and...

7 months ago

62

'Let One Book Lead Him to Another'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

I have not run the analytics but I believe the Joseph Epstein essay with the longest shelf life and largest number of citations is “Joseph Epstein’s Lifetime Reading Plan,” published in The American Scholar in 1983 and collected four years later in Once More Around the Block. A...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The First to Climb a Mountain Because It Is There' On this date in 1336, just for the hell of it, Francesco Petrarca (we know him as Petrarch), his...

9 months ago

62

'The First to Climb a Mountain Because It Is There'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

On this date in 1336, just for the hell of it, Francesco Petrarca (we know him as Petrarch), his brother Gherardo and two servants climbed to the 6,263-foot summit of Mount Ventoux in Provence. Morris Bishop, Vladimir Nabokov’s closest friend at Cornell, writes in Petrarch and...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Death Is Divestment, Death Is Communion' “Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed,...

7 months ago

62

'Death Is Divestment, Death Is Communion'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

“Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'For Now I Am As Lilliputian As All the Rest' “My mood is like the weather,” Chekhov writes on April 8, 1889. “I’m not doing any work, just...

9 months ago

61

'For Now I Am As Lilliputian As All the Rest'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

“My mood is like the weather,” Chekhov writes on April 8, 1889. “I’m not doing any work, just reading or pacing up and down. However, I don’t really mind having the time to read. It’s more enjoyable than writing. I feel that if I could live another forty years and spend the whole...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Amber of His Style' Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books has digitalized three volumes of Desmond MacCarthy’s essays and reviews...

9 months ago

61

'The Amber of His Style'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books has digitalized three volumes of Desmond MacCarthy’s essays and reviews -- Portraits (1931), Criticism (1932), Memories (1953) – with a promise of more to come. MacCarthy’s reputation in the U.S. is almost sub-atomic. Devotees of Bloomsbury think of hm...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Nothingness Is Our Need' One of R.L. Barth’s sisters-in-law found a tote bag containing poems and drafts in a cupboard, most...

8 months ago

61

'Nothingness Is Our Need'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

One of R.L. Barth’s sisters-in-law found a tote bag containing poems and drafts in a cupboard, most dating back to his time at Stanford in the late nineteen-seventies. He found epigrams (his trademark form as a poet) and some Martial translations. The bag also held “one fugitive...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'When Young Men Go to Die' Like most lifelong civilian Americans, I have never fired a gun in my life. I owned a BB gun when I...

8 months ago

61

'When Young Men Go to Die'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

Like most lifelong civilian Americans, I have never fired a gun in my life. I owned a BB gun when I was a kid and often fired my brother’s pellet gun. My experience with firearms is entirely second- or third-hand via the movies, which give me the illusion that I know...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Will Your Birds Be Always Wingless Birds' A questionnaire sent to Louis MacNeice in 1934 – that “low dishonest decade” was big on...

8 months ago

61

'Will Your Birds Be Always Wingless Birds'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

A questionnaire sent to Louis MacNeice in 1934 – that “low dishonest decade” was big on questionnaires to writers – asked, “Do you take your stand with any political or politico-economic party or creed?” The Irishman replied: “No. In weaker moments I wish I could.” Never a...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'He Belonged Essentially to the Order of Wags' A gift I prize is seeing the humor in writers not taxonomically labeled “Humorists.” If you tell me...

11 months ago

61

'He Belonged Essentially to the Order of Wags'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

11 months ago

A gift I prize is seeing the humor in writers not taxonomically labeled “Humorists.” If you tell me a piece by S.J. Pearlman has made you laugh my response is, “Enjoy yourself.” I don’t find Pearlman as funny as I did when I was a kid, though I’m happy for you. But if you tell me...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Well-known Types of Miracle' It’s grim out there and getting grimmer. Two poems encountered on the same day provided a touch of...

9 months ago

60

'Well-known Types of Miracle'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

It’s grim out there and getting grimmer. Two poems encountered on the same day provided a touch of buoyancy. The first was originally written in Russian by Vladimir Nabokov on May 6, 1923: “No, life is no quivering quandary! Here under the moon things are bright and dewy. We are...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'She Exhibits the Unrepentant Bad Taste Which Belongs to Good Taste in Its Good Sense' “Most poetry is as poor as most fiction or most biography, or most books. But it is often...

8 months ago

60

'She Exhibits the Unrepentant Bad Taste Which Belongs to Good Taste in Its Good Sense'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

“Most poetry is as poor as most fiction or most biography, or most books. But it is often so aggressively, so conceitedly poor and undistinguished that readers cannot be altogether blamed for not bothering with the new books as they come out, and I am always hesitant to make them...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Daring to His Own Disadvantage' “The words poetic and fatuous ought not to be synonyms; and to encounter a mind which is against...

6 months ago

59

'Daring to His Own Disadvantage'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

“The words poetic and fatuous ought not to be synonyms; and to encounter a mind which is against mock society, mock poetry, mock justice, mock spirituality—against any form of enslavement—is a benefit.” Marianne Moore could be a soft touch when it came to reviewing. She could...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Mouldering Boots of Other Days' The triolet, like its cousins the rondeau, rondel, and rondelet, is an intricate French verse form,...

10 months ago

59

'The Mouldering Boots of Other Days'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

10 months ago

The triolet, like its cousins the rondeau, rondel, and rondelet, is an intricate French verse form, usually eight lines long and written in iambic tetrameter. The first line is repeated as the fourth and seventh lines. Among English-language poets, Robert Bridges and Thomas Hardy...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Living Through Radical Change' Ten years ago, Joseph Epstein wrote to his friend Frederic Raphael: “I have myself long ago put...

9 months ago

59

'Living Through Radical Change'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

Ten years ago, Joseph Epstein wrote to his friend Frederic Raphael: “I have myself long ago put aside any thought about writing an autobiography. . . . When I became, almost without conscious decision, a bookish and a scribbling man, the larger sense of adventure went out of my...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'What Is Called an Amateur' I recently encountered a choice example of academic snobbery, the lording of a tenured professor...

a year ago

58

'What Is Called an Amateur'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

I recently encountered a choice example of academic snobbery, the lording of a tenured professor over lecturers, adjuncts and even “mere assistant professors.” Normally the perpetrator tries to disguise his snottiness or treat it as a joke but in this case the prima donna was...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Curious Examiner of the Human Mind' On June, 25, 1763, Boswell and Dr. Johnson dined at the Mitre Tavern on Fleet Street. The friends...

7 months ago

58

'A Curious Examiner of the Human Mind'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

On June, 25, 1763, Boswell and Dr. Johnson dined at the Mitre Tavern on Fleet Street. The friends had met for the first time just a month earlier at Thomas Davies’ bookshop on Russell Street. Johnson starts the conversation with a dismissal of Thomas Gray (1716-71). In the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Give Him the Darkest Inch Your Shelf Allows' Its 1,498 pages tip the scales at 3.2 pounds: Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson,...

9 months ago

58

'Give Him the Darkest Inch Your Shelf Allows'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

Its 1,498 pages tip the scales at 3.2 pounds: Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, originally published in 1929. At Kaboom Books I bought the twelfth printing, from 1959. The dustjacket is a little frayed around the edges but the book is otherwise sturdy. It collects the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Maintaining a Stable and Orderly Civilization' On the same day I removed all the books from one of the bookcases, dusted the shelves...

8 months ago

58

'Maintaining a Stable and Orderly Civilization'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

On the same day I removed all the books from one of the bookcases, dusted the shelves and reorganized the volumes, one of our cats leaped into an open cupboard in the kitchen. One of the four pegs supporting the middle shelf was missing and Trane’s weight tipped it enough so a...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'We Were Nothing in Ourselves Nothing More' “[H]e gave us some of the best poems of our times. And, after all, one must thank a man for what he...

a year ago

57

'We Were Nothing in Ourselves Nothing More'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

“[H]e gave us some of the best poems of our times. And, after all, one must thank a man for what he has done and not condemn him for his failures.” A timely, guilt-inducing reminder. It’s easy to scold a writer for not producing a masterpiece each time he goes to work. Good...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Deaf Unto the Suggestions of Tale-bearers' “Though the Quickness of thine Ear were able to reach the noise of the Moon, which some think it...

11 months ago

57

'Deaf Unto the Suggestions of Tale-bearers'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

11 months ago

“Though the Quickness of thine Ear were able to reach the noise of the Moon, which some think it maketh in it rapid revolution; though the number of thy Ears should equal Argus his Eyes . . .” The first surgery on my left ear was fifty years ago, prompted by a perpetually...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'And Here the Nothingness Shows Through' I watched an old favorite, Laurel and Hardy’s 1933 short Me and My Pal. It’s Oliver’s wedding day...

9 months ago

57

'And Here the Nothingness Shows Through'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

I watched an old favorite, Laurel and Hardy’s 1933 short Me and My Pal. It’s Oliver’s wedding day and his best man, Stanley, gives him a jigsaw puzzle as a wedding gift. Oliver dismisses it at first as “childish balderdash” and promptly gets hooked putting it together along with,...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'An Occasion for Festive Processions" “Others will balk at his sometimes extravagant vocabulary; words such as ‘amphisbaenic’ or ‘labarum’...

7 months ago

57

'An Occasion for Festive Processions"

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

“Others will balk at his sometimes extravagant vocabulary; words such as ‘amphisbaenic’ or ‘labarum’ or ‘ithyphallic’ will send them ‘scurrying’ to their dictionaries (why do they always ‘scurry’ or even ‘scuttle’? A new word, rightly used, should be an occasion for festive...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Every Departure Destroys a Class of Sympathies' As a boy I was spared most deaths. I've read of people who lose parents, siblings and close friends...

6 months ago

57

'Every Departure Destroys a Class of Sympathies'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

As a boy I was spared most deaths. I've read of people who lose parents, siblings and close friends when young, and wonder how they adapt to unprecedented loss. They have nothing to compare it to. The death that hit me hardest was President Kennedy’s, a month after my eleventh...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Doing Valuable Work in Literary Criticism' “Part of the drama of reading Boswell’s Life for the first time is that one can never (however much...

6 months ago

57

'Doing Valuable Work in Literary Criticism'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

“Part of the drama of reading Boswell’s Life for the first time is that one can never (however much classical or Christian erudition one brings to the task) predict confidently how Johnson is going to respond to this or that specific question; yet of course by the end one...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Seeing Means Going Over the Details' Isaac Waisberg, the internet’s librarian-in-chief, has published two passages by...

a year ago

57

'Seeing Means Going Over the Details'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

Isaac Waisberg, the internet’s librarian-in-chief, has published two passages by Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951), the French proto-blogger better known as Alain. He was a professor of philosophy whose students included Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Both excerpts are taken from...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Noble Unconsciousness Is in Him' A reader asks if I have any heroes. “I’m guessing Samuel Johnson is one,” she writes, and that’s...

6 months ago

56

'A Noble Unconsciousness Is in Him'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

A reader asks if I have any heroes. “I’m guessing Samuel Johnson is one,” she writes, and that’s correct. “I think people are too cynical to have heroes today,” she continues. “They’re embarrassed to say someone is a hero. Nobody’s good enough. Everybody wants to look for failure...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'. . . Or That He Did Not' Some of us enjoy footnotes and other annotations. Thoughtful, non-Kinbotean notes accompanying older...

7 months ago

56

'. . . Or That He Did Not'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

Some of us enjoy footnotes and other annotations. Thoughtful, non-Kinbotean notes accompanying older texts can identify historical figures and help us decipher obsolete words. As Joyce advised in the Wake: “Wipe your glosses with what you know.” My preference with Shakespeare...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'That Other Thermopylae, the Alamo' A reader asks for impressions of Texas, a place she, a lifelong Northerner, has never visited....

8 months ago

56

'That Other Thermopylae, the Alamo'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

A reader asks for impressions of Texas, a place she, a lifelong Northerner, has never visited. Twenty years ago last month I saw Texas for the first time, and the first surprise, seen from the air, was abundant greenery. I was expecting desert and tumbleweeds. Houston is...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'What She or He Ought to Know' In a typically mordant essay, “A Great Fog Over the Past,” Peter Hitchens cites “Spanish Waters,” a...

5 months ago

55

'What She or He Ought to Know'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

In a typically mordant essay, “A Great Fog Over the Past,” Peter Hitchens cites “Spanish Waters,” a poem by John Masefield, one of the first poets I claimed as my own when a boy, years before Eliot and Yeats. The poem’s “decrepit beggar,” as Hitchens puts it, “knows where the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'O Deliquescence of Our Quartz-like Loves!' A chemical engineer describing his recent research to me used a lovely word: deliquescent. The word...

6 months ago

55

'O Deliquescence of Our Quartz-like Loves!'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

A chemical engineer describing his recent research to me used a lovely word: deliquescent. The word entered English in the eighteenth century and its original context was strictly scientific: deliquescence occurs when a substance absorbs moisture from the air and becomes a...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Arid Interrogation' As boys, in our imaginations we tested ourselves. Would we prove courageous in combat? Our fathers...

5 months ago

53

'Arid Interrogation'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

As boys, in our imaginations we tested ourselves. Would we prove courageous in combat? Our fathers had, so we believed, during World War II. Could we withstand torture? These virtues, touched with Hollywood melodrama, seemed like essential aspects of maturity. We wanted to be...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'He Learned to Love Books' “Though most of the teachers followed Erasmus in seeking to make learning palatable, Montaigne...

5 months ago

52

'He Learned to Love Books'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

“Though most of the teachers followed Erasmus in seeking to make learning palatable, Montaigne considers himself fortunate to have avoided getting 'nothing out of school but a hatred of books, as do nearly all our noblemen,’” writes Donald Frame in his 1965 biography of the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Then Came the Barbarians' “Prose poetry” suggests transfusing a patient with a blood type not his own. You’ll kill him or at...

4 months ago

52

'Then Came the Barbarians'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

“Prose poetry” suggests transfusing a patient with a blood type not his own. You’ll kill him or at least make him sick. When I confront a prose poem I run, though sometimes I pause to laugh and then run. The question becomes, which is worse: the poet’s ineptness or his...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Particular Adroitness and Off-hand Readiness' For years, with plenty of interruptions, I’ve tried working my way through John Dryden’s prolific...

a year ago

52

'A Particular Adroitness and Off-hand Readiness'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

For years, with plenty of interruptions, I’ve tried working my way through John Dryden’s prolific output – poems, plays, translations, essays, letters. Much of it is lost on me, especially among the plays. His verse and essays are what I most enjoy, but a play, Amphitryon,or the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Grounded in the Deep Tradition of English Poesy' When I’m told someone, somewhere has started a new poetry journal, a little piece of me dies. Just...

4 months ago

52

'Grounded in the Deep Tradition of English Poesy'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

When I’m told someone, somewhere has started a new poetry journal, a little piece of me dies. Just what we’ve been waiting for: more precious self-revelations, strident politics and lineated prose. Nice to know the world can still surprise us. An Australian, Clarence Caddell, has...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'To Carry on With the Business of the Day' Beware of “nature poetry.” It tends to be not about nature but the poet and his self-regarding...

5 months ago

52

'To Carry on With the Business of the Day'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

Beware of “nature poetry.” It tends to be not about nature but the poet and his self-regarding epiphanies. Perhaps our finest nature poet is Yvor Winters. A basic understanding of biology is useful in discouraging pantheism and other forms of fashionable nature mysticism. We...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Beyond the Language of the Living' “After someone dies I find it hard to delete their contact from my phone. It feels cruel somehow, as...

5 months ago

52

'Beyond the Language of the Living'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

“After someone dies I find it hard to delete their contact from my phone. It feels cruel somehow, as if it was a final obliteration.” I didn’t know others felt this way, and dismissed it as my indulgence in sentimentality. Rabbi David Wolpe’s admission comes as reassurance. I...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'With Squeaky Wit the Light, Improper Verse' Without context or other clue, who do you think might have written this tart...

8 months ago

51

'With Squeaky Wit the Light, Improper Verse'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

Without context or other clue, who do you think might have written this tart little couplet?: “With squeaky wit the light, improper verse Falls on the heavy lunch and makes it worse.” I first encountered him in the eighth grade, in English class. He was sold to us as the “poet...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'He Signs His Name in Sparks' By trade my father was an ironworker for the City of Cleveland’s Municipal Light, always called...

6 months ago

51

'He Signs His Name in Sparks'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

By trade my father was an ironworker for the City of Cleveland’s Municipal Light, always called “Muny Light." At home he was a welder, specializing in wrought-iron railings. His aesthetic sense could be summarized in a single word: big. Or heavy. Everything he built was...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'To Be Made Out of Emotions, Colors, Life Itself' “[Robert Conquest] and his two closest friends, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, proved their...

6 months ago

50

'To Be Made Out of Emotions, Colors, Life Itself'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

“[Robert Conquest] and his two closest friends, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, proved their vocation by playing the games with language and perception that poets play, three Musketeers at a time when not much else was disturbing the quiet little cemetery of English...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Where Its Masters’ Love Is' The late D.G. Myers and I once talked about the tendency to pigeonhole writers according to some...

7 months ago

50

'Where Its Masters’ Love Is'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

The late D.G. Myers and I once talked about the tendency to pigeonhole writers according to some aspect of their subject matter. Melville is your go-to cetology guy and Edith Wharton took care of sleds. Or, as Nabokov said of Hemingway’s books: “something about bells, balls and...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Jell-O Once a Week' On Thursday I slipped my brother some Montaigne without him knowing the source. It...

5 months ago

50

'Jell-O Once a Week'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

On Thursday I slipped my brother some Montaigne without him knowing the source. It wasn’t plagiarism, exactly, and it was paraphrased. It’s a well-known passage from the essay “That to philosophize is to learn to die,” one that always reminds me of Spinoza: “It is uncertain...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'One of the Disadvantages of Wine' An offhand recounting of a conversation with Dr. Johnson: “He has great virtue, in not drinking...

4 months ago

50

'One of the Disadvantages of Wine'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

An offhand recounting of a conversation with Dr. Johnson: “He has great virtue, in not drinking wine or any fermented liquor, because, as he acknowledged to us, he could not do it in moderation. Lady M’Leod would hardly believe him, and said, ‘I am sure, sir, you would not carry...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Not Merely Mental Stenography' “Allow me a small confession: It has been some time since I have truly enjoyed an essay in a...

5 months ago

50

'Not Merely Mental Stenography'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

“Allow me a small confession: It has been some time since I have truly enjoyed an essay in a literary magazine. There are too many essays, and vanishingly few good essayists. There seems to be real confusion about whether style can conceal a fundamental incuriosity, whether...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'So Many Delicate Aphorisms of Human Nature' “We should hesitate to name any writings which would afford so large and so various a selection of...

4 months ago

49

'So Many Delicate Aphorisms of Human Nature'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

“We should hesitate to name any writings which would afford so large and so various a selection of detached passages complete in themselves. . . . We should be at a loss to name the writer of English prose who is his superior, or, setting Shakespeare aside, the writer of English...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Pristine Caldera of Consonants' The subject of quarks came up in conversation with an electrical engineer. We didn’t linger but I...

7 months ago

49

'A Pristine Caldera of Consonants'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

The subject of quarks came up in conversation with an electrical engineer. We didn’t linger but I got to explain its etymology. The word for the subatomic particle was coined by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who borrowed it from Finnegans Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'But Johnson Fought Back' Epigraphs to books are often superfluous. They can come off as cute or pretentious. They add...

4 months ago

48

'But Johnson Fought Back'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

Epigraphs to books are often superfluous. They can come off as cute or pretentious. They add little or nothing to the manner in which we read the book and often amount to our author showing off, touting his own vast reading or giving himself an unearned endorsement. The most...

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Anecdotal Evidence

''In Prose, Plain as Pike, Pillory' Austin Clarke (1896-1974) was an Irish poet of the generation after Yeats, the slightly...

3 months ago

48

''In Prose, Plain as Pike, Pillory'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

Austin Clarke (1896-1974) was an Irish poet of the generation after Yeats, the slightly older contemporary of Louis MacNeice and Patrick Kavanagh. In 1968 he published A Sermon on Swift and Other Poems, and the 117-line title poem appeared in The Massachusetts Review in 1970....

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Appear to the Public to be Some Sort of Miracle' On Christmas Eve 1890, Chekhov writes to his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin: “I believe in both...

5 months ago

48

'Appear to the Public to be Some Sort of Miracle'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

On Christmas Eve 1890, Chekhov writes to his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin: “I believe in both [Robert] Koch and spermine, and I praise the Lord. Kochines, spermines, etc. all appear to the public to be some sort of miracle that has sprung unexpectedly from someone’s head like...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Courage to Face Reality Squarely' I’m flying to Cleveland today to see my brother who has been diagnosed with cancer. It has already...

6 months ago

48

'The Courage to Face Reality Squarely'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

I’m flying to Cleveland today to see my brother who has been diagnosed with cancer. It has already metastasized and he’s in the Cleveland Clinic, waiting to be admitted to their hospice program. Ken turned sixty-nine in April and is two and a half years younger than me. My...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Recon Patrol Is a Small Unit' “A 21-year old Marine Corporal leading his first patrol — a 10-man Reconnaissance Team — kept a cool...

5 months ago

48

'A Recon Patrol Is a Small Unit'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

“A 21-year old Marine Corporal leading his first patrol — a 10-man Reconnaissance Team — kept a cool head in a tight situation.” Long before he was a poet and publisher, R.L. Barth in 1968-69 was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Vietnam....

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Everything is Singing, Blooming and Sparkling' In a May 4, 1889 letter to his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin, Chekhov complains of taking no...

9 months ago

48

'Everything is Singing, Blooming and Sparkling'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

In a May 4, 1889 letter to his friend and editor Alexi Suvorin, Chekhov complains of taking no interest in “reviews, conversations about literature, gossip, successes, failures, high royalties,” and adds: “[I]n short, I’ve become a damn fool. My soul seems to be stagnating. I...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Painstakingly Logical and Precise' A thought that never occurred to me but feels self-evidently right: “In the course of a reading...

6 months ago

48

'Painstakingly Logical and Precise'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

A thought that never occurred to me but feels self-evidently right: “In the course of a reading life, one often stumbles on excellent prose writers never before encountered; such discoveries, however, are less likely in poetry. First-rate poetry is a more manageable quantity....

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Chap Who Doesn't Care Much About Anything' Below the masthead of the August 19, 2024 issue of The Daily Chronicle is a brief, boxed...

5 months ago

48

'A Chap Who Doesn't Care Much About Anything'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

Below the masthead of the August 19, 2024 issue of The Daily Chronicle is a brief, boxed announcement: “Today is National Orangutan Day. The apes are the largest tree-dwelling animals on Earth. They spend 90 percent of their time in trees, even sleeping in leafy nests. No wonder...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Glory Seemingly Reserved For Poems' “He was born in the jumbled catacombs of the stair-stepped port of Odessa, late in 1894. Irreparably...

6 months ago

48

'A Glory Seemingly Reserved For Poems'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

“He was born in the jumbled catacombs of the stair-stepped port of Odessa, late in 1894. Irreparably Semitic, Isaac was the son of a rag merchant from Kiev and a Moldavian Jewess. Catastrophe has been the normal climate of his life.” Though born within five years of each other,...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The World's an End' In recent years John Dryden has become one of my reliable poets. He impresses me as a sane adult,...

5 months ago

48

'The World's an End'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

In recent years John Dryden has become one of my reliable poets. He impresses me as a sane adult, with equal emphasis on both of those words. No dabbling in drugs and madness. I brought a volume of his poems with me to Cleveland where I’m visiting my brother in hospice. No...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A University Education, Uncorrupted' A human being is “born an heir to an inheritance to which he can succeed only in a process...

a month ago

48

'A University Education, Uncorrupted'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

A human being is “born an heir to an inheritance to which he can succeed only in a process of learning.” Aristotle didn't get it quite right when he thought we could be defined by our capacity for speech and even, on occasion, rational discourse. No, it’s learning that makes us...

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Anecdotal Evidence

Kenneth C. Kurp 1955-2024 My brother died Saturday afternoon in the hospice in Cleveland, Ohio where he spent the last two...

5 months ago

48

Kenneth C. Kurp 1955-2024

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

My brother died Saturday afternoon in the hospice in Cleveland, Ohio where he spent the last two weeks of his life. He was age sixty-nine. I was with him as was his son, Abraham Kurp. I watched as his eyes closed and he stopped breathing. There was another sense, too, of a sudden...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Collection of Scraps and Shards of Knowledge' “During this time we know [John] Donne was collecting his fascinations in a book: a collection of...

6 months ago

47

'A Collection of Scraps and Shards of Knowledge'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

“During this time we know [John] Donne was collecting his fascinations in a book: a collection of scraps and shards of knowledge known as a commonplace book.” Like Donne (1572-1621), some of us are magpie-minded, collecting objects shiny and drab, often without obvious utility....

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Anecdotal Evidence

'He Is the Andy Warhol of Art' Guy Davenport was our Johnny Appleseed of culture. He was an academic who published in Harper’s and...

7 months ago

47

'He Is the Andy Warhol of Art'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

Guy Davenport was our Johnny Appleseed of culture. He was an academic who published in Harper’s and the Journal of the American Institute of Architects; Life magazine and Art News; National Review and Inquiry. He sowed allusions without regard for pretentious pieties. He loved...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'How Much Can Be Accomplished' Cleveland is traditionally divided between East Side and West Side. I’m a West-Sider, though I...

5 months ago

47

'How Much Can Be Accomplished'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

Cleveland is traditionally divided between East Side and West Side. I’m a West-Sider, though I haven’t lived in the city since 1977. The designation suggests working-class neighborhoods, many of them Slavic. Ethnicity was important, and not usually in the sense of bigotry. I was...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Butterflies Have Nothing to Do With Butter' Call me an aesthete but I’ve always favored the definition of butterfly given by Dr. Johnson in his...

6 months ago

47

'Butterflies Have Nothing to Do With Butter'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

Call me an aesthete but I’ve always favored the definition of butterfly given by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary: “A beautiful insect, so named because it first appears at the beginning of the season for butter.” Their seemingly gratuitous beauty, coupled with not stinging like...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'How Quickly It Would Slip By' “[S]ome of the memories I can now summon up have a greater intensity than the events...

5 months ago

47

'How Quickly It Would Slip By'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

“[S]ome of the memories I can now summon up have a greater intensity than the events themselves seemed to possess at the time, or rather – since memory has a filter of its own, sometimes surprising in what it suppresses or retains, but always significant – some of them stand out...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Each Sweaty Midnight I’m a Lifer' Think of this as an unexpected coda to Monday’s post, “A Recon Patrol Is a Small Unit,” in which I...

5 months ago

47

'Each Sweaty Midnight I’m a Lifer'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

Think of this as an unexpected coda to Monday’s post, “A Recon Patrol Is a Small Unit,” in which I asked readers to report anything they knew about the war correspondent Albert W. Vinson. He was author of a dispatch recounting a 1968 reconnaissance patrol in Vietnam led by the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'As Permanently a Monument As Anything' Once it was a commonplace: a letter in the mailbox, handwritten or typed, in an envelope most likely...

7 months ago

47

'As Permanently a Monument As Anything'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

Once it was a commonplace: a letter in the mailbox, handwritten or typed, in an envelope most likely moistened with the sender’s tongue and sealed. A person-to-person letter, not junk mail, credit-card come-ons, campaign postcards, jury summonses and the rest of the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Speak Knowledge Meagerly and Piteously' “Montaigne is heavy going, it has to be said.” For once the commonsensical Jules Renard is wrong....

4 months ago

46

'Speak Knowledge Meagerly and Piteously'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

“Montaigne is heavy going, it has to be said.” For once the commonsensical Jules Renard is wrong. There’s no context for the remark in his journal (October 1, 1898), so I take his words as given. Montaigne’s prose, at least in translation, seems clear and readily understood. The...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Dense, Democratic, Vulgar' When high summer arrives -- in Texas, long before this Thursday’s equinox – I think of Saratoga...

7 months ago

46

'Dense, Democratic, Vulgar'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

When high summer arrives -- in Texas, long before this Thursday’s equinox – I think of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where we bought our first house and lived for seven years. The Saratoga Race Course was less than a mile away. So were Yaddo and Broadway, the main drag downtown. We...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Shitcan the Sass' George Turberville writes in his epilogue to Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets (1567): “I write...

7 months ago

46

'Shitcan the Sass'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

George Turberville writes in his epilogue to Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets (1567): “I write but of familiar stuffe because my stile is lowe.” Today we call him a master of the “plain style,” the opposite of ornate poeticizing, along with his contemporaries George...

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Anecdotal Evidence

Arthur Krystal My review of two books by Arthur Krystal -- A Word or Two Before I Go: Essays Then and Now and Some...

6 months ago

45

Arthur Krystal

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

My review of two books by Arthur Krystal -- A Word or Two Before I Go: Essays Then and Now and Some Unfinished Chaos: The Lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald – is published in Ron Slate’s On the Seawall.

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Where I Went and Cannot Come Again' A brief return to the Russian word toska mentioned in Thursday’s post by Gary Saul Morson in...

9 months ago

45

'Where I Went and Cannot Come Again'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

A brief return to the Russian word toska mentioned in Thursday’s post by Gary Saul Morson in reference to Chekhov. Dave Lull alerted me to Nabokov’s explication of the word in his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. In the second of the four volumes, Nabokov writes: “No...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'About As Approachable As a Porcupine' The large bay window facing the garden in front of our house is better than television....

3 months ago

45

'About As Approachable As a Porcupine'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

The large bay window facing the garden in front of our house is better than television. No commercials, no dependency on internet whims, no bills to pay. That’s where I do most of my reading (best lighting in the house). From the couch I watch the show in the garden. Butterflies,...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Memories Packed in the Rapid-Access File' Last Saturday morning, the day my brother would die, the Uber driver who carried me from hotel to...

5 months ago

45

'Memories Packed in the Rapid-Access File'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

Last Saturday morning, the day my brother would die, the Uber driver who carried me from hotel to hospice in the morning went by the professional name “Lazarus” – an omen I choose to leave unexamined and merely enjoy. Ken would have enjoyed it. Shortly after his death one of the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'An Enormous Yes' “The voice was unmistakable. It made misery beautiful.” My ideal setting for listening to music is...

6 months ago

45

'An Enormous Yes'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

“The voice was unmistakable. It made misery beautiful.” My ideal setting for listening to music is my eleven-year-old Nissan. When I play a CD, I listen and never treat it as background. I hate the idea of music as ambient filler, a second atmosphere. My youngest son plays music...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Very Close to the Caliber of Mark Twain' I found a 2001 interview with Shelby Foote in The American Enterprise. The author of the three...

4 months ago

44

'Very Close to the Caliber of Mark Twain'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

I found a 2001 interview with Shelby Foote in The American Enterprise. The author of the three volumes of The Civil War: A Narrative (1958-1974) was asked by Bill Kauffman about the scarcity of politicians who are today capable of formulating their own coherent let alone eloquent...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Steeplejacks Top Out the Chrysler Building,' A friend sent me a link to a 1978 BBC documentary about a working-class hero in England. I had never...

7 months ago

44

'Steeplejacks Top Out the Chrysler Building,'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

A friend sent me a link to a 1978 BBC documentary about a working-class hero in England. I had never heard of Fred Dibnah, practitioner of a trade I didn’t know was still extant: steeplejack. In the words of the OED: “a person who climbs steeples or tall chimneys to repair them.”...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Understand Our Fellow Creatures a Little Better' Edwin Arlington Robinson, not the sunniest of poets, writes to his friend Harry de Forest Smith on...

4 months ago

44

'Understand Our Fellow Creatures a Little Better'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

Edwin Arlington Robinson, not the sunniest of poets, writes to his friend Harry de Forest Smith on May 13, 1896: “If printed lines are good for anything, they are bound to be picked up some time; and then, if some poor devil of a man or woman feels any better or any stronger...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'For the Ordinary Educated Man' I’ve read most of Robert Conquest’s books – history, poetry, fiction – and here is the sole passage...

6 months ago

44

'For the Ordinary Educated Man'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

I’ve read most of Robert Conquest’s books – history, poetry, fiction – and here is the sole passage I have almost committed to memory: “Literature exists for the ordinary educated man, and any literature that actively requires enormous training can be at best of only peripheral...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Man of My Kidney' I met my nephrologist for the first time when we shared an elevator to his office on the fourth...

9 months ago

44

'A Man of My Kidney'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

I met my nephrologist for the first time when we shared an elevator to his office on the fourth floor of the hospital. Between patients he was eating a banana, his breakfast, and carried a stack of folders in his other hand. On the front of his white lab coat was his name, the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Dubious or Questionable Medium' In 1972, Daryl Hine, the editor of Poetry, requested poems “protesting the acceleration of the...

a year ago

44

'A Dubious or Questionable Medium'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

In 1972, Daryl Hine, the editor of Poetry, requested poems “protesting the acceleration of the undeclared Indo-Chinese War” for a special issue to be published in September of that year. Hine said he would be “grateful to consider any poem on this terrible and topical subject...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Let Us See Them There in the Shadows' A childhood acquaintance has died. We were never close. In fact, I didn’t know he was still alive...

7 months ago

44

'Let Us See Them There in the Shadows'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

A childhood acquaintance has died. We were never close. In fact, I didn’t know he was still alive until a friend told me he was dead. What I remember is his face, his general demeanor, roughly the sort of behavior I could expect of him. I last saw him more than half a century...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Hurricane's Usefulness Has Outlasted It' Ambrose Bierce’s entry for hurricane in The Devil’s Dictionary (1906): “An atmospheric...

6 months ago

44

'The Hurricane's Usefulness Has Outlasted It'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

Ambrose Bierce’s entry for hurricane in The Devil’s Dictionary (1906): “An atmospheric demonstration once very common but now generally abandoned for the tornado and cyclone. The hurricane is still in popular use in the West Indies and is preferred by certain old-fashioned...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'These Pieces of Moral Prose' “Where did you get your humility? I thought that was an extinct virtue.” Creating anything...

8 months ago

44

'These Pieces of Moral Prose'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

“Where did you get your humility? I thought that was an extinct virtue.” Creating anything worthwhile, whether joke, villanelle or pot of lentil soup, calls for pride and humility. Pride because one presumes to add to the world’s bounty and impose it on others; humility because...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Aesthetically They Are Still Delightful' “Early Ellington records are like vintage cars. They are not as he or anyone else would make them...

9 months ago

44

'Aesthetically They Are Still Delightful'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

“Early Ellington records are like vintage cars. They are not as he or anyone else would make them nowadays, but historically they are still important and aesthetically they are still delightful.” Let's not confine Philip Larkin’s conclusion exclusively to Duke Ellington’s early...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Whole Hog Barbecu'd!' I was surprised to see that Alexander Pope was familiar with the most popular cuisine served in...

4 months ago

44

'A Whole Hog Barbecu'd!'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

I was surprised to see that Alexander Pope was familiar with the most popular cuisine served in Texas: barbecue. You’ll find his reference in “The Second Satire in the Second Book of Horace Paraphrased”: “Oldfield, with more than Harpy throat endu’d, Cries, ‘send me, Gods! a...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'What Will Become of My Diary?' “During the morning hours of the first of September 1939, war broke out between Germany and Poland...

5 months ago

44

'What Will Become of My Diary?'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

“During the morning hours of the first of September 1939, war broke out between Germany and Poland and indirectly between Germany and Poland’s allies, England and France. This war will indeed bring destruction upon human civilization which merits annihilation and destruction....

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Whole Point of Literature' I learned of some twits who see no reason to read Tolstoy because he was such a terrible...

3 months ago

43

'The Whole Point of Literature'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

I learned of some twits who see no reason to read Tolstoy because he was such a terrible human being, as though this constituted recently declassified information. Such an understanding of literature and literary history, if followed to its logical conclusion, will result in a...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'An Air of Baffled Absence' R.L. Barth has sent a new epigram, “Baffled,” not overtly related to the Vietnam War: “I see...

6 months ago

43

'An Air of Baffled Absence'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

R.L. Barth has sent a new epigram, “Baffled,” not overtly related to the Vietnam War: “I see these hands on the deck railing, but Whose are they? Have they any meaning? What?” Some readers will understand. The familiar can become strange with age. That’s not always a...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'They Will Leave Behind Trenches' “You wouldn’t give up utopia it was too nourishing seductive / For mommy’s boys the heirs of fortune...

3 months ago

43

'They Will Leave Behind Trenches'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

“You wouldn’t give up utopia it was too nourishing seductive / For mommy’s boys the heirs of fortune heirs / To the bloody myths of the twentieth city.” Today is the centenary of Polish poet and essayist Zbigniew Herbert. The Anglophone world has been fortunate. Herbert’s poems...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'When We Have Excellent Books, They Sell' “People tell us all the time that civilization is finished, that the world is coming to an end. But...

5 months ago

43

'When We Have Excellent Books, They Sell'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

“People tell us all the time that civilization is finished, that the world is coming to an end. But then we look at our sales details and we smile.” John Byron Kuhner posts a rare dispatch of hope from the world of books, the beating heart of what remains of our civilization. In...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'I Hope This Explanation Is Wrong' One of life’s unsolved puzzles, especially for readers and writers: How can certain arrangements of...

5 months ago

43

'I Hope This Explanation Is Wrong'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

One of life’s unsolved puzzles, especially for readers and writers: How can certain arrangements of words encountered in childhood or youth, and revisited regularly for a lifetime, still inspire delight, while others, in effect, evaporate before we hear them? In the latter...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'My Soul, Beyond Distant Death" More than any secular writer I can think of, Vladimir Nabokov hints at the existence of an...

4 months ago

43

'My Soul, Beyond Distant Death"

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

More than any secular writer I can think of, Vladimir Nabokov hints at the existence of an afterlife. He never preaches and makes no theological assertions. His frequent use of the word “paradise” is often ambiguous, blurring its mundane, metaphorical meaning – an earthly place...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Until He Un-Alived' “But at bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and if a poet...

5 months ago

43

'Until He Un-Alived'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

“But at bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and if a poet loses his pleasure-seeking audience he has lost the only audience worth having, for which the dutiful mob that signs on every September is no substitute.” Philip Larkin’s...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Art and Practice of Reading Aloud to Others' A longtime reader in Philadelphia, a retired attorney, tells me that since the start of the COVID-19...

a year ago

43

'The Art and Practice of Reading Aloud to Others'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

A longtime reader in Philadelphia, a retired attorney, tells me that since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown he has been reading books aloud to his wife, most recently The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis. His list of more than a dozen titles includes Moby-Dick (“our overall...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Oaks That Were Acorns That Were Oaks' We hear acorns hitting the roof of the house and the cars. It makes the cats nervous and sounds like...

a year ago

42

'Oaks That Were Acorns That Were Oaks'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

We hear acorns hitting the roof of the house and the cars. It makes the cats nervous and sounds like slow hail. The crop this year is prodigious. The patio is covered with them, more than the squirrels can keep up with. Stomping on them make a satisfying crack/pop sound. I’ve...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Similar Universality of Voice' I reproach my younger self for being lazy and not seriously studying languages other than English. I...

7 months ago

42

'A Similar Universality of Voice'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

I reproach my younger self for being lazy and not seriously studying languages other than English. I dabbled in Latin and German and retain a smattering of vocabulary and little grammar. If I were to study another language today my first choice would likely be Italian in order to...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'You Have to Read the Words' “Tolstoy was so much better than any other writer who ever lived that you couldn’t even remotely...

4 months ago

42

'You Have to Read the Words'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

“Tolstoy was so much better than any other writer who ever lived that you couldn’t even remotely compare anyone to him.” I first read War and Peace in the eighth grade in a paperback abridgement. I remember reading it in science class, half-heartedly hiding the book behind the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Culmination of Contemporary Economism' For half a century my brother earned his living making picture frames, some of which were themselves...

5 months ago

42

'The Culmination of Contemporary Economism'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

For half a century my brother earned his living making picture frames, some of which were themselves works of art. In later years he relied more on accounts with hotel chains and the glass office buildings in downtown Cleveland. Frames for these corporate accounts he called...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Learning Is Not Defunct in the Republic' “As you probably don’t read National Review, I enclose proof that learning is not defunct in the...

4 months ago

42

'Learning Is Not Defunct in the Republic'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

“As you probably don’t read National Review, I enclose proof that learning is not defunct in the Republic. Buckley had printed a note . . . praising Waugh’s delightful whimsy in coining a nonsense phrase like tohu bohu. Catholics tend not to have read a word of Holy Writ.” I...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Poem Saves Time and Space' Discovering a good writer long after his death is a gift and a betrayal. Gratitude mingles with...

8 months ago

42

'The Poem Saves Time and Space'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

Discovering a good writer long after his death is a gift and a betrayal. Gratitude mingles with regret and even guilt. Selfishly, we wish he had truly been our contemporary and we had been smarter and watched him develop as a writer. Instead, we compensate by scrambling after his...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'An Immense Special Talent' D.G. Myers and I met in person only once, in March 2012, when David came to Houston to see his...

4 months ago

41

'An Immense Special Talent'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

D.G. Myers and I met in person only once, in March 2012, when David came to Houston to see his oncologist. We had lunch in a Mexican restaurant and talked for hours, then I drove him to the hospital. He gave me the Library of America’s collection of Henry James’ writings on...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Minute Passage of Private Life' A young reader asks “Why ‘anecdotal’?” It was a last-minute decision that Sunday afternoon almost...

a year ago

41

'A Minute Passage of Private Life'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

A young reader asks “Why ‘anecdotal’?” It was a last-minute decision that Sunday afternoon almost eighteen years ago. I had it narrowed down to three or four potential titles but liked the legal/criminological connotation of “anecdotal evidence,” which is always judged suspect by...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'There Is No Nothingness' Once asked about politics in a symposium portentously titled “The Writer’s Situation,”...

5 months ago

41

'There Is No Nothingness'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

Once asked about politics in a symposium portentously titled “The Writer’s Situation,” J.V. Cunningham replied: “You can write on politics or not. I do not. But is politics meant here? Or is it, rather, ideology? The latter is religious, not political, though religion...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'More Interesting to Me Than the Future' “The past has always been more interesting to me than the future, just as I have found pessimists...

6 months ago

41

'More Interesting to Me Than the Future'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

“The past has always been more interesting to me than the future, just as I have found pessimists more amusing than optimists and failures more attractive than successes. I do not say that my preferences are based upon universal principles or that everyone should share them; in...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'By Studying Little Things' “He advised me to keep a journal of my life, fair and undisguised.” So did my high-school English...

6 months ago

41

'By Studying Little Things'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

“He advised me to keep a journal of my life, fair and undisguised.” So did my high-school English teacher two centuries later. Boswell took Dr. Johnson’s advice and later mined the resulting journal when assembling his Life of Johnson (1791). Much of Boswell’s London Journal...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'That Marsh Light Is Still Burning Hard' I’m suspicious of the itch for ranking books and making lists. Too often it’s a substitute...

11 months ago

41

'That Marsh Light Is Still Burning Hard'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

11 months ago

I’m suspicious of the itch for ranking books and making lists. Too often it’s a substitute for actually reading them, a ruse for flaunting one’s hipness or sophistication. My late friend David Myers was fond of assembling such lists, which are likely to assure higher-than-average...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Master of Light But Stinging Irony' I bought Vikram Seth’s novel-in-verse The Golden Gate when it was published in 1986. Around that...

7 months ago

41

'A Master of Light But Stinging Irony'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

I bought Vikram Seth’s novel-in-verse The Golden Gate when it was published in 1986. Around that time I was giving up the practice of writing in books, which had always left me a little uncomfortable. Instead, I switched to keeping notebooks. In The Golden Gate I see that I...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Poem Calls For a Formal Reading' I swore off poetry readings a long time ago for reasons of health. The atmosphere of pressurized...

7 months ago

40

'A Poem Calls For a Formal Reading'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

I swore off poetry readings a long time ago for reasons of health. The atmosphere of pressurized solipsism makes it difficult for me to breathe. Sugary adulation induces diabetic comas. Free verse is emetic and I’m allergic to hipsters but Thursday evening I broke my vow and went...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Someone Who Could Never Be a Peasant' I first encountered Robert Alter in 1970 in the issue of TriQuarterly devoted to Vladimir Nabokov,...

4 months ago

40

'Someone Who Could Never Be a Peasant'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

I first encountered Robert Alter in 1970 in the issue of TriQuarterly devoted to Vladimir Nabokov, already one of my favorite writers. Alter’s contribution was “Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov and the Art of Politics,” which Nabokov later described as “practically flawless.” A...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Fruit of My Studies' I’ve been invited to join an online book club and have politely declined. I even like some of the...

4 months ago

40

'The Fruit of My Studies'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

I’ve been invited to join an online book club and have politely declined. I even like some of the readers who already belong, but by nature I’m not a joiner of anything. As soon as an arrangement among friendly individuals becomes formalized – by that I mean, organized, with...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Personal Affections' Only recently have I learned of the entrenched snobbery in certain quarters against anthologies. It...

3 months ago

40

'Personal Affections'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

Only recently have I learned of the entrenched snobbery in certain quarters against anthologies. It seems to be rooted in the conviction that readers ought to read writers in their original volumes, not someone’s curated selection, or something like that. In common with most...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Richly, Sometimes Dreamily, Melodic' A friend has given me an unexpected gift: a first American edition of Poems for Children (Henry Holt...

10 months ago

40

'Richly, Sometimes Dreamily, Melodic'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

10 months ago

A friend has given me an unexpected gift: a first American edition of Poems for Children (Henry Holt and Co., 1930), with a printed note before the title page: “Three hundred copies of ‘Poems for Children’ have been specially printed and bound, and have been signed by the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Not Simply Bad Prose' “It is not simply bad prose—a tank is not a badly constructed automobile.” Gilbert Highet (1906-78)...

11 months ago

40

'Not Simply Bad Prose'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

11 months ago

“It is not simply bad prose—a tank is not a badly constructed automobile.” Gilbert Highet (1906-78) was a Scottish-born, Oxford-educated American classicist who taught at Columbia for thirty-three years and managed to become a bona fide pop-culture “celebrity.” In 1952 he was...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The World Has Always Seemed to Me So Various' I dropped out of university after my junior year in 1973 and didn’t return to campus to complete my...

4 months ago

40

'The World Has Always Seemed to Me So Various'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

I dropped out of university after my junior year in 1973 and didn’t return to campus to complete my B.A. in English until 2003. The lack of a degree never got in the way of working for almost a quarter-century as a newspaper reporter. I suspect a degree in most non-STEM...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'It Bubbles and Chuckles Along' “Persistently obscure writers will usually be found to be defective human beings.” A truth I had...

3 months ago

40

'It Bubbles and Chuckles Along'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

“Persistently obscure writers will usually be found to be defective human beings.” A truth I had been waiting to hear for much of my life. Willful obscurity (which is not the same as complexity) is favored by writers contemptuous of readers. Avant-gardistes often fancy...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Human mind at its deepest and highest' Vladimir Nabokov is speaking in 1965 to Robert Hughes for the Television 13 Educational Program in...

a year ago

40

'A Human mind at its deepest and highest'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

Vladimir Nabokov is speaking in 1965 to Robert Hughes for the Television 13 Educational Program in New York: “One of the saddest cases is perhaps that of Osip Mandelshtam--a wonderful poet, the greatest poet among those trying to survive in Russia under the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Tomorrow I Propose to Regulate My Room' A reader in Columbus, Ohio reports a “Samuel Johnson sighting in Ogden Nash.” In the December...

a month ago

40

'Tomorrow I Propose to Regulate My Room'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

A reader in Columbus, Ohio reports a “Samuel Johnson sighting in Ogden Nash.” In the December 21, 1968 issue of The New Yorker he found the poem “Is There a Dr. Johnson in the House.” It’s a typical irregularly lined, jokily rhymed production by Nash that begins: “Do you...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Gleams Like a Warm Homestead Light' Here is epigram 1.33 by Marcus Valerius Martialis (c. 38-102 A.D.), better known in English as...

3 months ago

40

'Gleams Like a Warm Homestead Light'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

Here is epigram 1.33 by Marcus Valerius Martialis (c. 38-102 A.D.), better known in English as Martial: “In private she mourns not the late-lamented; If someone’s by, her tears leap forth on call. Sorrow, my dear, is not so easily rented. They are true tears that without witness...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'An Ill-Assorted Collection' A friend has broken up with her boyfriend and he is launching protracted salvos of nasty emails in...

3 months ago

40

'An Ill-Assorted Collection'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

A friend has broken up with her boyfriend and he is launching protracted salvos of nasty emails in her direction. As prose they are better than average. There have been no threats of violence and little profanity. The ex’s weapon of choice is a detailed critique of every aspect...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Certificate of Naturalization' In our basement was a gray file cabinet we were forbidden to touch. Naturally I opened it and in one...

5 months ago

39

'Certificate of Naturalization'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

In our basement was a gray file cabinet we were forbidden to touch. Naturally I opened it and in one of the drawers I found an old leather wallet containing the ID cards of a stranger with the surname Kurpiewski. Who is this? Why is the name so similar to ours? I couldn’t ask...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'What American Beauty Should Be' An old friend called and reminded me of the September almost forty years ago when we hiked along...

4 months ago

39

'What American Beauty Should Be'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

An old friend called and reminded me of the September almost forty years ago when we hiked along Otter Creek in southern Vermont near Dorset. Often we hiked in Otter Creek, which is filled with granite boulders. It was less hiking than climbing horizontally. Between the stones...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Perhaps the Most Impressive of All' Spices meant salt and pepper. For my family like others in the American working class, there was no...

4 months ago

39

'Perhaps the Most Impressive of All'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

Spices meant salt and pepper. For my family like others in the American working class, there was no cardamom or turmeric. When I was a kid those would have sounded vaguely like medical conditions. We never heard of such things until decades later. For some baked goods, breakfast...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'He Is Some Twentie Sev’rall Men at Least' Whitman “contained multitudes,” of course, while George Herbert says of a man: “He is some...

9 months ago

39

'He Is Some Twentie Sev’rall Men at Least'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

Whitman “contained multitudes,” of course, while George Herbert says of a man: “He is some twentie sev’rall men at least / Each sev’rall houre.” What sounds self-dramatizing in the American simply acknowledges our inconstancy, our fickle nature, in Herbert’s poem “Giddinesse.” In...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'How It Sounds When Read Out Loud' Our eighth-grade English teacher, Miss Clymer, had us open the textbook to a poem written...

2 months ago

38

'How It Sounds When Read Out Loud'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

Our eighth-grade English teacher, Miss Clymer, had us open the textbook to a poem written seventy-five years earlier and picked students to read aloud each of its four, eight-line stanzas. She suggested we pay attention to who is speaking, as the poem is written as a dialogue...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Shadow Cabinet of Writers' “All of us, probably, have some favorite unfashionable author. Occasionally a minority taste can be...

4 months ago

38

'A Shadow Cabinet of Writers'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

“All of us, probably, have some favorite unfashionable author. Occasionally a minority taste can be powerful enough to make for some isolated masterpiece a small niche in literary history -- Henry Green’s Loving and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr. Fortune's Maggot have both...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'One I Loved Taught Here, Provoking Strife' When Yvor Winters retired from the Stanford English Department in 1966 after almost forty years, the...

3 months ago

38

'One I Loved Taught Here, Provoking Strife'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

When Yvor Winters retired from the Stanford English Department in 1966 after almost forty years, the university published a commemorative volume, Laurel, Archaic, Rude: A Collection of Poems. It gathers twenty-six poems written by former students, including Edgar Bowers,...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Perpetual Fountain of Fun' “It was not only in the best company he uttered his best things. He was a perpetual fountain of fun;...

6 months ago

38

'A Perpetual Fountain of Fun'

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6 months ago

“It was not only in the best company he uttered his best things. He was a perpetual fountain of fun; an improvisatore, who raised upon some shrewd comment wild edifices of exaggeration. His talk ascended from rational wit to buffoonery; yet his towerings never daunted others. He...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'I Suppose Age Brings Context' An old friend and former blogger in England has been reading Anthony Hecht and detects what he calls...

4 months ago

38

'I Suppose Age Brings Context'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

An old friend and former blogger in England has been reading Anthony Hecht and detects what he calls “a very faint ghost of Hart Crane at times.” It’s not a connection I have ever made but I recognize a certain lushness of diction in both of them. “[I]t's a similar sense of...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Dull Night in a Buffalo Hotel' When writing journalism, H.L. Mencken occasionally practiced what I think of as an informal form of...

9 months ago

38

'A Dull Night in a Buffalo Hotel'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

When writing journalism, H.L. Mencken occasionally practiced what I think of as an informal form of Impressionism. He would organize isolated bits of description, usually snapshots of people, without explicit narration or formal structure. The effect, sometimes satirical, was...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Poets Who Are Plain and Gladsome' Being or pretending to be a philistine is great fun. It was one of Philip Larkin’s favorite ruses...

10 months ago

38

'Poets Who Are Plain and Gladsome'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

10 months ago

Being or pretending to be a philistine is great fun. It was one of Philip Larkin’s favorite ruses (“Books are a load of crap”). It’s certain to rile the pompous and pretentious, so all you have to do is sit back and enjoy the sputtering. I’ve happened on a first-rate anthology of...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Word Can Open Like a Tomb to Reveal Its Past' The poet William Wenthe opens his essay “The Glamour of Words” with a provocative memory. It was the...

10 months ago

38

'A Word Can Open Like a Tomb to Reveal Its Past'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

10 months ago

The poet William Wenthe opens his essay “The Glamour of Words” with a provocative memory. It was the anniversary of Charles Dickens’ death and he was in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, where Dickens is interred and his sister is speaking to mark the occasion. Wenthe looks...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Interior Decoration Doesn't Count" Just last week, and not for the first time, I had a dream set in Kay’s Books in downtown Cleveland,...

10 months ago

37

'Interior Decoration Doesn't Count"

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

10 months ago

Just last week, and not for the first time, I had a dream set in Kay’s Books in downtown Cleveland, where I visited often as a kid and worked in 1975. I was in the basement in the general hardback fiction section where I saw the copy of Under the Volcano I bought there forty-nine...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Scrawls With a Lavish Hand Its Signature' “Where the wind listeth, there the sailboats list, / Water is touched with a light case of hives /...

3 months ago

37

'Scrawls With a Lavish Hand Its Signature'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

“Where the wind listeth, there the sailboats list, / Water is touched with a light case of hives / Or wandering gooseflesh.” Carl George is the sort of scientist whose company I most enjoy. He is a generalist, what used to be called a naturalist. Now an emeritus professor of...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'One of the Least Appealing Aspects of Our Species' The twentieth century was a graduate-level education in irony. Our medical advances...

3 months ago

37

'One of the Least Appealing Aspects of Our Species'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

The twentieth century was a graduate-level education in irony. Our medical advances were extraordinary – antibiotics, insulin, the Salk and Sabin vaccines. Airplanes, television, computers, space exploration. And yet Guy Davenport was not being needlessly morbid when he...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'One's Lucidity Is Shaken' “This is beyond imagining: one’s lucidity is shaken. Difficult to think clearly.” As the horrors...

3 months ago

37

'One's Lucidity Is Shaken'

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3 months ago

“This is beyond imagining: one’s lucidity is shaken. Difficult to think clearly.” As the horrors piled up, the twentieth century taught us to accept such expressions as useful and accurate, not hyperbole, though the events defied belief and understanding, and often still do. The...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Jewish Kind of Feeling of the World' Isaac Bashevis Singer, speaking with an interviewer in 1983: “I really don’t believe that a writer...

2 months ago

37

'A Jewish Kind of Feeling of the World'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

Isaac Bashevis Singer, speaking with an interviewer in 1983: “I really don’t believe that a writer can have a programme. Many have; they say, ‘I’m writing about alienation’, or whatever they call it. I don’t have this programme. I have a story to tell and I sit down to tell the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

"A Fury of Self-Deception, Malice, and Conceit' There’s no getting away from the din. Who knew the human voice, individually and in the collective,...

3 months ago

37

"A Fury of Self-Deception, Malice, and Conceit'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

There’s no getting away from the din. Who knew the human voice, individually and in the collective, could carry on this way? An innocent question or observation prompts a sonic explosion. I’m unable to get that angry and loud so quickly. Perhaps if my family were threatened....

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Anecdotal Evidence

'This Refined, White-Sheeted Torture' My tutelary spirit of recent days has been the American poet L.E. Sissman, dead from Hodgkin...

5 months ago

37

'This Refined, White-Sheeted Torture'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

My tutelary spirit of recent days has been the American poet L.E. Sissman, dead from Hodgkin lymphoma at age forty-eight. Out in the hall I spoke with three oncologists after they had yet again examined my brother. I asked the question no one had yet asked: How much time does...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'An Accepter and Recorder of Things as They Are' It has been a good week for the satisfaction of knowing that a book I recommended has been read and...

a year ago

37

'An Accepter and Recorder of Things as They Are'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

It has been a good week for the satisfaction of knowing that a book I recommended has been read and enjoyed. A reader in New York City tells me the title character of V.S. Pritchett’s 1951 novel Mr. Beluncle reminds her of her late father, a man she describes as “feckless.” And...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'One Is Always at Home in One’s Past' I will quote the writer who has given me more pleasure – “aesthetic bliss” he called it – than any...

9 months ago

37

'One Is Always at Home in One’s Past'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

I will quote the writer who has given me more pleasure – “aesthetic bliss” he called it – than any other and whose birthday we observed earlier this week: “One is always at home in one’s past.” That might serve as a gloss on his autobiography, Speak, Memory, in which he writes at...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Who Needs Your Stories?' Have you ever read something – it might be a poem or a history book, almost anything – and...

3 months ago

37

'Who Needs Your Stories?'

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3 months ago

Have you ever read something – it might be a poem or a history book, almost anything – and encountered a phrase or sentence so self-contained and dense with meaning, in words so perfectly arranged, that you stop reading, ponder and write it down? You may not even continue with...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'His Own Exclusive Object' I’ve accumulated some of the accoutrements of age – bifocals, cane, hearing aids. None embarrasses...

5 months ago

37

'His Own Exclusive Object'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

I’ve accumulated some of the accoutrements of age – bifocals, cane, hearing aids. None embarrasses me and all make life less annoying. I’ve never been seriously ill. I take my handful of vitamins and meds in the morning. I no longer drink and never smoked. Among the last things I...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Scabrous Memory Writhes Here, Underneath' I’ve just learned that some thirty percent of Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, is paved,...

2 months ago

36

'The Scabrous Memory Writhes Here, Underneath'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

I’ve just learned that some thirty percent of Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, is paved, covered in concrete and asphalt. That doesn’t count buildings and other structures. It amounts to roughly 384 square miles of ground surface that is “case-hardened, carapaced,” to...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Sacrifice and Doom' Scholars of Russian literature tell us the edition of Anton Chekhov’s letters published between 1944...

3 months ago

36

'Sacrifice and Doom'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

Scholars of Russian literature tell us the edition of Anton Chekhov’s letters published between 1944 and 1951 was heavily censored by Soviet editors, filled with ellipses that signify an excised word, phrase or sentence. Nothing surprising here. Censorship is an obligatory tool...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Taking Your Time, Angel of Death' I like plain speaking when it comes to death. Not needlessly harsh but direct and above all...

2 months ago

36

'Taking Your Time, Angel of Death'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

I like plain speaking when it comes to death. Not needlessly harsh but direct and above all unvarnished, no flowers, closer to a coroner’s report than a greeting card. A well-meaning reader has sent belated condolences for my brother’s death in August without once using any of...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A General Effect of Pleasing Impression' Back in the Golden Age of Blogging, the decline of which roughly coincided with the arrival of...

a year ago

36

'A General Effect of Pleasing Impression'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

Back in the Golden Age of Blogging, the decline of which roughly coincided with the arrival of Anecdotal Evidence in 2006, literary memes were far more popular. Some were trivial parlor games, a way for certain readers to safely show off without having ever opened a book....

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Its Super-Ego Has Gone AWOL' The American philosopher Brand Blanshard delivered the Riecker Memorial Lecture at the University of...

3 months ago

36

'Its Super-Ego Has Gone AWOL'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

The American philosopher Brand Blanshard delivered the Riecker Memorial Lecture at the University of Arizona in 1962. It was published that year as a twenty-three-page pamphlet titled “On Sanity in Thought and Art.” For much of the text Blanshard reviews various twentieth-century...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'We Enter Again November' The final stanza of Howard Nemerov’s “Elegy of Last Resort” from his second collection, Guide to the...

2 months ago

36

'We Enter Again November'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

The final stanza of Howard Nemerov’s “Elegy of Last Resort” from his second collection, Guide to the Ruins (1950): “We enter again November; cold late light Glazes the field, a little fever of love, Held in numbed hands, admires the false gods; While lonely on this coast the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Like a Wagon-Load of Monkeys' “It is not an accident that Gulliver has become a child’s book; only a child could be so...

a year ago

36

'Like a Wagon-Load of Monkeys'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

“It is not an accident that Gulliver has become a child’s book; only a child could be so destructive, so irresponsible and so cruel.” And only a parent could acknowledge the potential for raw nastiness in the heart of a child. V.S. Pritchett had two children and few illusions...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'There Are Many Real Things of Beauty Here' A reader sent me a screed against beauty he had found online. The writer wasn’t advocating...

4 months ago

36

'There Are Many Real Things of Beauty Here'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

A reader sent me a screed against beauty he had found online. The writer wasn’t advocating its opposite, ugliness, exactly, though his prose definitely leans in that direction. Only a graduate-school alumnus could come up with such silly ideas. Rather, he seemed to be saying that...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'To Consider Seriously My Condition' Soon after he is shipwrecked on an island off the coast of Venezuela and has finished...

a year ago

36

'To Consider Seriously My Condition'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

Soon after he is shipwrecked on an island off the coast of Venezuela and has finished salvaging everything useful from the wreckage, Robinson Crusoe builds a calendar: “After I had been there about ten or twelve days, it came into my thoughts that I should lose my reckoning of...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Neither Angels Nor Devils' A favorite story about Dr. Johnson reminded me of something the late critic John Simon had written...

11 months ago

36

'Neither Angels Nor Devils'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

11 months ago

A favorite story about Dr. Johnson reminded me of something the late critic John Simon had written on his blog five years ago. In a post titled “Curse Words,” abbreviated by Simon throughout as “CW,” he reviews profanity as used in various settings and languages, including Croat,...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Brief, Dry, Almost Colorless Account ' The Polish writer Gustaw Herling-Grudziński (1919-2000) -- Gulag survivor, co-founder of Kultura and...

a year ago

36

'A Brief, Dry, Almost Colorless Account '

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

The Polish writer Gustaw Herling-Grudziński (1919-2000) -- Gulag survivor, co-founder of Kultura and author of A World Apart: Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II (1951) – has sent me back to Varlam Shalamov and his Kolyma stories. Herling-Grudziński in 1971...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'More Than Documentary' “Literariness, as I understand it, does not necessarily entail any particular set of...

5 months ago

35

'More Than Documentary'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

“Literariness, as I understand it, does not necessarily entail any particular set of formal qualities. What makes a work literary is the ability to be understood and appreciated outside the context of its origin. That is why a literary work, however valuable as a document of its...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'They Never Settle Down' A reader has happened on an unfamiliar word while reading Dimitri Obolensky’s The Byzantine...

a month ago

35

'They Never Settle Down'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

A reader has happened on an unfamiliar word while reading Dimitri Obolensky’s The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500-1453 (1971), one he finds “especially amusing”: “Cosmas [Indicopleustes] tells us of monks who, ignoring their vows, live unchastely, engage in trade and...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Sum of All the Losses' Abraham Lincoln was six feet, four inches tall, making him the tallest of U.S. presidents (LBJ was...

2 months ago

35

'The Sum of All the Losses'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

Abraham Lincoln was six feet, four inches tall, making him the tallest of U.S. presidents (LBJ was half an inch shorter). The crown of his trademark top hat – a stovepipe, it was called -- measured twelve inches in height. Allowing for the silk hat settling on his head, the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'As Sensitive As Anyone Else' “In common with James Jones, Gina Berriault knows that ill-educated or inarticulate people are as...

9 months ago

35

'As Sensitive As Anyone Else'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

“In common with James Jones, Gina Berriault knows that ill-educated or inarticulate people are as sensitive as anyone else. She renders their speech with a fine and subtle ear for the shy or strident inaccuracies, for the bewilderment of missed points and for the dim, sad rhythms...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Let the Words Glide Through the Air' Some years ago, out of the blue, a reader whose name I have forgotten sent me a copy of No Earthly...

a year ago

35

'Let the Words Glide Through the Air'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

Some years ago, out of the blue, a reader whose name I have forgotten sent me a copy of No Earthly Estate: The Religious Poetry of Patrick Kavanagh (The Columba Press, Dublin, 2002) by Father Tom Stack. I was grateful because it sent me back to the Irish poet (1904-67) who seems...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'On the Cello of Shared Grief' With the deaths of certain writers our reaction is shamefully selfish: Why did he do that to me? No...

a month ago

35

'On the Cello of Shared Grief'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

With the deaths of certain writers our reaction is shamefully selfish: Why did he do that to me? No thought for family or friends, or even other readers, merely one’s sense of personal betrayal. That’s how I felt seven years ago when Richard Wilbur died at age ninety-six, as...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'An Important Part of Anyone’s Reading' A variation on the question Matthew Walther reports getting in his essay “The One Hundred Pages...

a month ago

35

'An Important Part of Anyone’s Reading'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

A variation on the question Matthew Walther reports getting in his essay “The One Hundred Pages Strategy” – “How do you do it?” – is the one I get when a workman or friend visits my home office where most of my books are shelved: “You read all these?” I can reply with one of...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Curiosity to Inquire Into All Things' “Concupiscence of experience, boundless curiosity to set our foot everywhere, to enter...

2 months ago

35

'Curiosity to Inquire Into All Things'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

“Concupiscence of experience, boundless curiosity to set our foot everywhere, to enter every possible situation. Montaigne.” I could have signed my name to that when I was twenty. I wanted to visit every country in the world, even the most dangerous. I made plans to move to...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'I’d Be the Man Dares Clearly Sing' I have no musical talent apart from a sometimes annoying gift for remembering lyrics, and not always...

9 months ago

35

'I’d Be the Man Dares Clearly Sing'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

I have no musical talent apart from a sometimes annoying gift for remembering lyrics, and not always the good stuff. I know all the words to a radio jingle for a car dealer in Cleveland, circa 1964, among other clutter. A related symptom is the long-lasting earworm. Much of this...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'An Old Man or Young Man Mad About Literature' Sometimes an eccentric judgment – one that reflects the critic’s discernment, not merely his wish to...

9 months ago

34

'An Old Man or Young Man Mad About Literature'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

Sometimes an eccentric judgment – one that reflects the critic’s discernment, not merely his wish to provoke and attract attention – proves useful to the common reader. Take a sentence from Ford Madox Ford's final book, The March of Literature (1939): “The modern English language...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Energy in Things Shone Through Their Shapes' Some fugitive thinkers among us long for order in a manner almost nostalgic: “I envied those past...

2 months ago

34

'The Energy in Things Shone Through Their Shapes'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

Some fugitive thinkers among us long for order in a manner almost nostalgic: “I envied those past ages of the world When, as I thought, the energy in things Shone through their shapes, when sun and moon no less Than tree or stone or star or human face Were seen but as fantastic...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Forlorn Hope' Published in the February 1950 issue of Partisan Review was a “symposium” -- always a feature...

2 months ago

34

'A Forlorn Hope'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

Published in the February 1950 issue of Partisan Review was a “symposium” -- always a feature beloved by editors and loquacious respondents – this one titled “Religion and the Intellectuals.” Such things tend to be heavy on posturing and vast generalizations. I might have been...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Some Could, Some Could Not, Shake Off Misery' Last week I wrote a post about the poet Bob Barth, the patrol he led as a 21-year-old...

5 months ago

34

'Some Could, Some Could Not, Shake Off Misery'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

Last week I wrote a post about the poet Bob Barth, the patrol he led as a 21-year-old Marine Corporal in Vietnam, and the war correspondent who wrote a dispatch about him for a newspaper. Two days later, after learning that the stringer, Albert W. Vinson, soon took his own life,...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Poet's Hope' Erica Light is the daughter of my late friend Helen Pinkerton (1927-2017), the poet and Melville...

9 months ago

34

'A Poet's Hope'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

Erica Light is the daughter of my late friend Helen Pinkerton (1927-2017), the poet and Melville scholar. We exchange emails several times each year, usually devoted to what we are reading. This week she reported reading some of the writers and books I’ve mentioned recently at...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Book You Know You Don’t Understand' Some thirty years ago, at his request, I met with an author in upstate New York who wanted me to...

a year ago

34

'A Book You Know You Don’t Understand'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

Some thirty years ago, at his request, I met with an author in upstate New York who wanted me to write a feature story for my newspaper about him and the small-press book he had written. Frank had been lobbying me for weeks by telephone. He was middle-aged but carried himself...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Every Corner Is Fraught with Memory' A.J. Liebling’s valediction – to New York City, The New Yorker and the grand celebration that was...

a year ago

34

'Every Corner Is Fraught with Memory'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

A.J. Liebling’s valediction – to New York City, The New Yorker and the grand celebration that was his life as a writer – was published two weeks after his death, in the January 11, 1964 issue of the magazine that had printed more than five-hundred of his pieces since he joined...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Thus Massive Was the Vessel, Built in Vain' Gee-whiz technology soon grows obsolete and quaint. On this date in 1934, the USS Macon, a U.S. Navy...

6 months ago

34

'Thus Massive Was the Vessel, Built in Vain'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

Gee-whiz technology soon grows obsolete and quaint. On this date in 1934, the USS Macon, a U.S. Navy airship – blimp, dirigible, Zeppelin – successfully tracked the heavy cruiser USS Houston as it carried President Franklin Roosevelt on a secret voyage from Annapolis, Md., to...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'I Wish He Would Explain His Explanation' On this date, April 10, in 1816, Coleridge and Lord Byron met for the only time, at the latter’s...

9 months ago

34

'I Wish He Would Explain His Explanation'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

On this date, April 10, in 1816, Coleridge and Lord Byron met for the only time, at the latter’s house in Piccadilly. Earlier, Coleridge had a friend deliver to Byron a copy of his latest and last play, Zapolya, and a letter explaining that for the previous fifteen years he had...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Demographer of the Common Woe' Only in the last twenty years or so have I started accumulating deaths, logging them on a...

a year ago

34

'Demographer of the Common Woe'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

Only in the last twenty years or so have I started accumulating deaths, logging them on a internal list and weighing them against my own precious self. I’ve led a improbably healthy life which only encouraged the universal young man’s conviction that I was immune to mortality and...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'And Then Became a Name Like Others Slain' In a six-word paragraph in “Preliminary,” his brief introduction to Undertones of War, Edmund...

2 months ago

34

'And Then Became a Name Like Others Slain'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

In a six-word paragraph in “Preliminary,” his brief introduction to Undertones of War, Edmund Blunden articulates the impulse that would drive his poetry for the next half-century: “I must go over it again.” Psychically, there was no Armistice. Whether to purge its memory or...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Humour Is Reason Itself' The saddest man I know wishes more than anything to be thought of as a comedian, a jokester, the...

a month ago

34

'Humour Is Reason Itself'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

The saddest man I know wishes more than anything to be thought of as a comedian, a jokester, the reliably funny guy at the party. The sadness derives from his inability to say or do anything even modestly amusing. People will laugh aloud at something he says out of pity and an...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'With All Its Philistinism and Coarseness' My roommate freshman year was the son of a Slovak father and an Austrian mother who had emigrated to...

3 months ago

34

'With All Its Philistinism and Coarseness'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

My roommate freshman year was the son of a Slovak father and an Austrian mother who had emigrated to the U.S. after World War II. Mike was trilingual from birth, without an accent unless it was a Cleveland accent that I couldn’t hear because it was mine as well. His tastes often...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'All These Jolts of Beauty' Once I interviewed a mycologist who, before his lecture, removed a yellow mushroom from an oak tree...

2 months ago

33

'All These Jolts of Beauty'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

Once I interviewed a mycologist who, before his lecture, removed a yellow mushroom from an oak tree in front of the hall where he was speaking and munched on it while he spoke. A few years later the writer Paul Metcalf, author of Genoa (1965), swore me to secrecy before revealing...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Time Is Tight' My brother is dying as he lived – stubbornly. He has been in hospice for two weeks and is...

5 months ago

33

'Time Is Tight'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

My brother is dying as he lived – stubbornly. He has been in hospice for two weeks and is failing incrementally. On Monday we were swapping memories and he stopped talking on Tuesday, the same day he stopped eating. He lies on his back on the hospice bed, mouth open, eyes staring...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Milestone, Insignificant' Understandably, readers and critics like to take credit for rediscovering forgotten writers...

a month ago

33

'A Milestone, Insignificant'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

Understandably, readers and critics like to take credit for rediscovering forgotten writers and resuscitating their reputations. Imagine being the guy who, in 1909, read Moby-Dick (1851; out of print, 1887) and declared Melville (d. 1891) a genius a decade before Van Doren,...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Well Educated and Glad of the Fact' “[A] literary man or woman is someone who is not only steeped in literature but has made this...

2 months ago

33

'Well Educated and Glad of the Fact'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

“[A] literary man or woman is someone who is not only steeped in literature but has made this immersion into literature part of his or her own life, so that the experience of books has been integral with the experience of life and therefore strongly influences his or her general...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'It's on the Russian Level' “I’m not a great reader of fiction. I read through all of Jane Austen with pleasure. I read through...

6 months ago

33

'It's on the Russian Level'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

“I’m not a great reader of fiction. I read through all of Jane Austen with pleasure. I read through George Eliot at school, but I was too young to appreciate her then. But about a year ago I read Middlemarch. Most marvellous book. Best thing in nineteenth-century English fiction,...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'In a More Just World' Our youngest son’s bedroom has lately turned into an overstuffed warehouse. Last year, as a junior...

4 months ago

33

'In a More Just World'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

Our youngest son’s bedroom has lately turned into an overstuffed warehouse. Last year, as a junior at Rice, he lived off-campus in an apartment. This year he’s back in a dormitory so most of his “housewares” – clothing, dishes and utensils, tchotchkes – have been heaped in his...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Landscape in One Word!' “When, in the course of a day, a man has read a newspaper, written a letter, and not wronged anyone,...

2 months ago

33

'A Landscape in One Word!'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

“When, in the course of a day, a man has read a newspaper, written a letter, and not wronged anyone, that is more than enough.” Enough for what? Probably to have established a minimum standard of decency and contentment. Jules Renard (1864-1910) is no stuffy moralist. There’s...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'He Knows to Get a Dollar' The word tummler I learned from A.J. Liebling. It’s the title of a story he collected in his first...

11 months ago

33

'He Knows to Get a Dollar'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

11 months ago

The word tummler I learned from A.J. Liebling. It’s the title of a story he collected in his first book, Back Where I Came From (1938). “Tummler” was published in the February 26, 1938 issue of The New Yorker and begins: “To the boys of the I.&Y., Hymie Katz is a hero. He is a...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Flow, Like Waters After Summer Show’rs' “As two men sit silent, after having exhausted all their topics of conversation; one says, ‘It is...

6 months ago

33

'Flow, Like Waters After Summer Show’rs'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

“As two men sit silent, after having exhausted all their topics of conversation; one says, ‘It is very fine weather,’ and the other says, ‘Yes;’—one blows his nose, and the other rubs his eye-brows; (by the way, this is very much in Homer’s manner;) such seems to be the case...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Old Landor's Bones Are Laid' On Tuesday I wrote about Walter Savage Landor, his poems and especially Imaginary Conversations, a...

4 months ago

33

'Old Landor's Bones Are Laid'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

On Tuesday I wrote about Walter Savage Landor, his poems and especially Imaginary Conversations, a collection of 174 dialogues, mostly of historical and literary figures, published in five volumes between 1824 and 1829. I keep a mental list of books I admire and enjoy that seem...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'He Could Take Part in This Savouring of the World' One of the ways biologists distinguish the animate from the inanimate, and the dead, is motility....

6 months ago

33

'He Could Take Part in This Savouring of the World'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

One of the ways biologists distinguish the animate from the inanimate, and the dead, is motility. Life moves independently, under its own power. Stasis suggests the end of life. Travel is especially prized by those unable to do so, whether confined to bed or a Soviet Bloc regime....

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Winter Came in August Killing Fruit and Seed' A sad and sorely final yet incomplete tagline found after a poem in the Winter 1986 issue of The...

3 months ago

33

'Winter Came in August Killing Fruit and Seed'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

A sad and sorely final yet incomplete tagline found after a poem in the Winter 1986 issue of The American Scholar: “Edward Case’s work has appeared in various journals, including the New Criterion, the Wall Street Journal, and Modern Age. This poem was taken from a collection of...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Whole Time Reading, Reading, Reading' “I’m not doing any work, just reading or pacing up and down. However, I don’t really mind having the...

a month ago

33

'The Whole Time Reading, Reading, Reading'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

“I’m not doing any work, just reading or pacing up and down. However, I don’t really mind having the time to read. It’s more enjoyable than writing. I feel that if I could live another forty years and spend the whole time reading, reading, reading, and learning how to write with...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'I Am Entirely Sure That I Like It' On March 27, 1905, Theodore Roosevelt had just started his second term as president of the United...

10 months ago

33

'I Am Entirely Sure That I Like It'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

10 months ago

On March 27, 1905, Theodore Roosevelt had just started his second term as president of the United States when he wrote a letter to a little-known poet living in Boston: Dear Mr. Robinson: I have enjoyed your poems especially The Children of the Night so much that I must write to...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Where They Grind the Grain of Thought' Let me sing the praises of Miss Milly, Miss McClain, Miss Esson, Miss Shaker, Miss Martin, Miss...

a year ago

32

'Where They Grind the Grain of Thought'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

Let me sing the praises of Miss Milly, Miss McClain, Miss Esson, Miss Shaker, Miss Martin, Miss Rose, Miss Whistler – my teachers, K-6, at Pearl Road Elementary School. Most were young and pretty, more like big sisters than mothers. On the television in Miss Shaker’s class we...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'We Live Missing Something' Four years late, I’ve read Gary Saul Morson’s “Poet of Loneliness,” his review of Fifty-Two Stories...

9 months ago

32

'We Live Missing Something'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

Four years late, I’ve read Gary Saul Morson’s “Poet of Loneliness,” his review of Fifty-Two Stories (Knopf, 2020), a Chekhov translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I ordered the collection early in the COVID-19 lockdown and will always associate it with the other...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Passions and Perturbations of the Mind' In his Dictionary (1755), Dr. Johnson illustrates fifteen words with citations from Robert Burton’s...

a year ago

32

'Passions and Perturbations of the Mind'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

In his Dictionary (1755), Dr. Johnson illustrates fifteen words with citations from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): addle, colly, costard, doter, to filch, to fleer, giddyheaded, griper, hotspur, to macerate, muckhill, mutter, oligarchy, quacksalver and squalor....

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Anecdotal Evidence

'He Treated Us Like Adults' I grew up thinking writers – poets, certainly – were not quite real. None lived in my neighborhood....

a year ago

32

'He Treated Us Like Adults'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

I grew up thinking writers – poets, certainly – were not quite real. None lived in my neighborhood. I never saw writers on television. My parents never talked about them, as they might actors and politicians, who also were unreal. Without thinking too deeply about it, I put...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Some Spirit That Didn’t Wobble' “As a youngster I came to the classics simply by following the clues of other writers. Cooper,...

a year ago

32

'Some Spirit That Didn’t Wobble'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

“As a youngster I came to the classics simply by following the clues of other writers. Cooper, Stevenson, Whitman, even Edgar Rice Burroughs seemed to lead, allusion by allusion, back to a body of writing that was solider and wiser, some spirit that didn’t wobble, wasn’t under...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'We Caught the Christmas Beetle' I understand why people might be repelled by a poem titled “When We Were Kids.” A wallow...

a month ago

32

'We Caught the Christmas Beetle'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

I understand why people might be repelled by a poem titled “When We Were Kids.” A wallow in nostalgia can prove deadly. But the language in Clive James’ twelve stanzas cataloging an Australian childhood is exotic enough to interest this American reader, apart from their poetic...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Stimulated to Vigour and Activity' When John Ruskin (b. 1819) traveled as a boy, his father packed in his luggage four small volumes of...

9 months ago

32

'Stimulated to Vigour and Activity'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

When John Ruskin (b. 1819) traveled as a boy, his father packed in his luggage four small volumes of Dr. Johnson’s Rambler and Idler essays. In his peculiar memoir Praeterita (1885), Ruskin tells us “had it not been for constant reading of the Bible, I might probably have...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Intensely Cultivated and Painstakingly Honest' In the brief foreword to her first prose collection, Predilections (1955), Marianne Moore writes as...

2 months ago

32

'Intensely Cultivated and Painstakingly Honest'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

In the brief foreword to her first prose collection, Predilections (1955), Marianne Moore writes as good an apologia for her manner of writing, among others, as I’ve ever encountered: “Silence is more eloquent than speech – a truism; but sometimes something that someone...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Known to All But Themselves' Suddenly, there’s nothing shameful about ignorance. I mean personally, not as an indictment of the...

6 months ago

32

'Known to All But Themselves'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

Suddenly, there’s nothing shameful about ignorance. I mean personally, not as an indictment of the bigger culture. There’s so much I don’t know or understand, and that knowledge of my ignorance no longer bothers me very much. I still like learning things but there was a time when...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'On a Certain Street There Is a Certain Door' Borges titled a sonnet in The Gold of the Tigers, his 1972 collection, "J.M.": “On a certain street...

7 months ago

32

'On a Certain Street There Is a Certain Door'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

Borges titled a sonnet in The Gold of the Tigers, his 1972 collection, "J.M.": “On a certain street there is a certain door shut with its bell and its exact address and with a flavor of lost Paradise, which in the early evening I can never open to enter. The day’s work at its...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Principle Is Growth' I remember learning as a kid the word dendrology while reading about maple trees (we had seven in...

10 months ago

31

'The Principle Is Growth'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

10 months ago

I remember learning as a kid the word dendrology while reading about maple trees (we had seven in our front yard – all are gone, one carried away by a tornado) in a field guide: the study of trees. From the Greek for “tree.” A close synonym is silvics, this time from the Latin. I...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Love of Reading Is Caught, Not Taught' I’ve used “home library” to describe the accumulation of books in our house but it’s starting to...

3 months ago

31

'The Love of Reading Is Caught, Not Taught'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

I’ve used “home library” to describe the accumulation of books in our house but it’s starting to sound a little pretentious. For now I’ll keep it at “books.” Nadya Williams titles her essay “Home Libraries Will Save Civilization,” which, I understand, is more reader-enticing than...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'To Feel With Melancholy Wonder' I was introduced to the poet, critic and editor Stanley Burnshaw (1906-2005) in the mid-Seventies by...

7 months ago

31

'To Feel With Melancholy Wonder'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

I was introduced to the poet, critic and editor Stanley Burnshaw (1906-2005) in the mid-Seventies by Edward Dahlberg, a difficult man who furthered my education. Collected in Epitaphs for Our Time: The Letters of Edward Dahlberg (George Braziller, 1967) are five letters to...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Uneven, Irregular, and Multiform Movement' “There are readers—and I am one of them—whose reading is rather like a series...

3 months ago

31

'Uneven, Irregular, and Multiform Movement'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

“There are readers—and I am one of them—whose reading is rather like a series of intoxications.” Driving while reading is discouraged. Once, in Bellevue, Wash., while stopped at a red light, I was intoxicated by the book propped against the wheel until a cop pulled up, rolled...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'He Has Embalmed So Many Eminent Persons' Over the years I wrote thousands of pieces – hard news stories, features, columns, obituaries,...

10 months ago

31

'He Has Embalmed So Many Eminent Persons'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

10 months ago

Over the years I wrote thousands of pieces – hard news stories, features, columns, obituaries, reviews of books, movies and music – for the newspapers where I worked in Ohio, Indiana and New York. They’re clipped and saved in a chaotic file cabinet. Most, I, like the rest of the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Although Too Many Readers Have Forgotten' My education continues. Here is “Artillery” (Hazards, 1930) by the English poet Wilfrid Wilson...

2 months ago

31

'Although Too Many Readers Have Forgotten'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

My education continues. Here is “Artillery” (Hazards, 1930) by the English poet Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, previously unknown to me: “All night I sat beside the bed And watched that senseless moaning head Backwards and forwards toss and toss, When suddenly he sat upright And...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Remarkable Literary Judgment' She was twelve or thirteen, a girl in a hooded sweatshirt seated beside a woman I assume was her...

5 months ago

31

'Remarkable Literary Judgment'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

5 months ago

She was twelve or thirteen, a girl in a hooded sweatshirt seated beside a woman I assume was her mother. She sat on the aisle two rows ahead of me. The cabin of the plane glowed with screens while she was reading Andrew R. MacAndrew’s 1961 translation of Dead Souls, the Signet...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Mandelstam Dances Barefoot in the Snow Alone' “In the end like all great poets he became a jester” Not the usual encomium one expects for Osip...

3 months ago

31

'Mandelstam Dances Barefoot in the Snow Alone'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

“In the end like all great poets he became a jester” Not the usual encomium one expects for Osip Mandelstam, dead at age forty-seven in a Soviet camp, but the eulogist is Zbigniew Herbert, a congenitally ironic poet, ever aware of the comic in the appalling. For my birthday I...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Just to Sweeten the Cup' “It is to be remembered,” Ford Madox Ford writes in The March of Literature (1939), “that a passage...

a month ago

31

'Just to Sweeten the Cup'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

“It is to be remembered,” Ford Madox Ford writes in The March of Literature (1939), “that a passage of good prose is a work of art absolute in itself and with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writing for piano of...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'That Grand Marxist Stalin Did Ten In' In one of the essential books published in the twentieth century, The Great Terror (1968; rev. 1990,...

a month ago

31

'That Grand Marxist Stalin Did Ten In'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

In one of the essential books published in the twentieth century, The Great Terror (1968; rev. 1990, 2008), Robert Conquest (1917-2015) writes matter-of-factly: “We are told in recent Soviet articles that on 12 December 1937 alone, Stalin and Molotov sanctioned 3,167 death...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Monsoons, Boredom, Stench' R.L. Barth takes as the epigraph to his new chapbook, Ghost Story (Scienter Press, Louisville, Ky.,...

11 months ago

31

'The Monsoons, Boredom, Stench'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

11 months ago

R.L. Barth takes as the epigraph to his new chapbook, Ghost Story (Scienter Press, Louisville, Ky., 2024), a passage from Dr. Johnson’s Idler essay for September 2, 1758: “I suppose every man is shocked when he hears how frequently soldiers are wishing for war. The wish is not...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Postmodern Pigeonhole Is a Shuck' With Tom Disch’s suicide in 2008 we lost not only one of our best poets, a fine writer of short...

2 months ago

30

'The Postmodern Pigeonhole Is a Shuck'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

With Tom Disch’s suicide in 2008 we lost not only one of our best poets, a fine writer of short stories and of one novel, Camp Concentration, but perhaps the most entertaining of our critics. His only recent rivals have been Turner Cassity and R.S. Gwynn. “Entertainment” and...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Death Is Not Far From Me' It’s in the nature of most writers to come up with their own rules and obey them when it serves...

11 months ago

30

'Death Is Not Far From Me'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

11 months ago

It’s in the nature of most writers to come up with their own rules and obey them when it serves their purposes. Even the strictest formalist bends a little in the service of what works aesthetically. The byproduct of that decision-making process is “style.” Good work can come out...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Nothing Makes a Man More Reverent' I have never thought of reading as a “hobby.” I put the word in quotes because I sense a patronizing...

2 months ago

30

'Nothing Makes a Man More Reverent'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

I have never thought of reading as a “hobby.” I put the word in quotes because I sense a patronizing tinge to the word. A hobby is a lesser pastime than a job, something frivolous, a “leisure activity” that most people in the past couldn’t afford because they had to earn a...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Moved—Stopp’d--Shall I Go On?—No' The professor asked me to write a paper on Tristram Shandy, the novel she had introduced to us in...

2 months ago

30

'Moved—Stopp’d--Shall I Go On?—No'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

The professor asked me to write a paper on Tristram Shandy, the novel she had introduced to us in her eighteenth-century English fiction class. It was her favorite novel. Its bawdy humor matched her own. For me it was love at first sight – for the novel, I mean. I was already a...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'I Am Thinking This May Be My Last Summer' I never encountered the name Keith Douglas in school. We knew some of the English poets of the first...

8 months ago

30

'I Am Thinking This May Be My Last Summer'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

I never encountered the name Keith Douglas in school. We knew some of the English poets of the first war – Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon – but the second seemed a blank. On my own, I learned of the Americans – Karl Shapiro, Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov. Only...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Their Thoughts, Their Longings, Hopes, Their Fate' A new record: stopped three times at train crossings in a single day without leaving the city,...

11 months ago

30

'Their Thoughts, Their Longings, Hopes, Their Fate'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

11 months ago

A new record: stopped three times at train crossings in a single day without leaving the city, driving only to the university library and back, twenty-two miles. Because of its sprawling, unplanned nature, Houston is a dense web of train tracks, as John Bainbridge, a staff writer...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Working a Thing Out' Long ago an editor urged me never to assume I knew what readers were thinking or what they wanted....

7 months ago

30

'Working a Thing Out'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

Long ago an editor urged me never to assume I knew what readers were thinking or what they wanted. It’s presumptuous to do so. Mind-reading quickly turns into seeking approval from readers and sucking up to them. Be clear, don’t condescend, respect the reader’s intelligence....

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Anecdotal Evidence

'An Obscuration of the Luminaries of Heaven' In 1963, our street in a suburb on the West Side of Cleveland was still unpaved and the...

9 months ago

30

'An Obscuration of the Luminaries of Heaven'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

In 1963, our street in a suburb on the West Side of Cleveland was still unpaved and the city periodically coated it with tar. Rain fell on the morning of July 20 but by late afternoon the skies had cleared and all that remained of the rain were puddles in the water-proof street....

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Amid Tremendous History, New Pity' Oscar Williams (1900-4) was a middling poet with a gift for compiling excellent anthologies, thirty...

10 months ago

30

'Amid Tremendous History, New Pity'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

10 months ago

Oscar Williams (1900-4) was a middling poet with a gift for compiling excellent anthologies, thirty of which he published during his lifetime. Early on, several of them were my primers, an inviting way to learning the poetic tradition in English on the cheap. One of them, the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Even Erudition is Possible Outside Academe' A reader tells me he earned his B.A. in English several years ago and now he works for a non-profit...

6 months ago

30

'Even Erudition is Possible Outside Academe'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

A reader tells me he earned his B.A. in English several years ago and now he works for a non-profit that pushes “arts education,” whatever that might be. I don’t take him for an idealist. He’s bright, personable, an ambitious reader and bored. Our culture doesn’t know what to do...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'To Express It As Nearly As I Can' Over the weekend I remembered a blog I visited fairly often during my early ventures into the...

2 months ago

30

'To Express It As Nearly As I Can'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

Over the weekend I remembered a blog I visited fairly often during my early ventures into the blogosphere. This would be around 2006, the year I launched Anecdotal Evidence. The proprietor and I exchanged a few emails. He was a reader though his blog was not exclusively devoted...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'So Important That It Ought to Absorb Him' In his brief portrait of Joseph Conrad, Desmond MacCarthy tells us the novelist “felt himself...

2 months ago

30

'So Important That It Ought to Absorb Him'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

In his brief portrait of Joseph Conrad, Desmond MacCarthy tells us the novelist “felt himself impelled to attempt an intenser vividness in description. Try, just try, so to describe something that the inattentive reader must see it, and the attentive one can never forget that he...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'An Open-ended Project' Two writers separated by language, experience and two and a half centuries make...

11 months ago

30

'An Open-ended Project'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

11 months ago

Two writers separated by language, experience and two and a half centuries make complementary observations about memory. Here is Dr. Johnson in The Idler essay he published on this date, February 17, in 1759: “The two offices of memory are collection and distribution; by one...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Magnetism, an Ardor, a Refusal to Be False' “It’s against his nature to be a critic—he is too grateful.” That’s from one of Elias Canetti’s...

3 months ago

29

'A Magnetism, an Ardor, a Refusal to Be False'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

“It’s against his nature to be a critic—he is too grateful.” That’s from one of Elias Canetti’s notebooks, collected in Notes from Hampstead (trans. John Hargraves, 1998). While I admire the work of a handful of critics – Dryden, Johnson, Winters, Cunningham, a few others –...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'It's Uncanny. The Past Is Not Dead.' “The Ferryman’s Due,” my article about Andrew Rickard and his Obolus Press, is published in the...

a month ago

29

'It's Uncanny. The Past Is Not Dead.'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

“The Ferryman’s Due,” my article about Andrew Rickard and his Obolus Press, is published in the January 2025 issue of The New Criterion.: “Rickard often encounters such passages, in which the author he is translating seems to speak for him. ‘It’s uncanny. The past is not dead,’...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Crisply, Pithily, and, Very Often, Cruelly' Tom Disch on Turner Cassity: “A poet so consistently epigrammatic can be dismissed, by those...

7 months ago

29

'Crisply, Pithily, and, Very Often, Cruelly'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

7 months ago

Tom Disch on Turner Cassity: “A poet so consistently epigrammatic can be dismissed, by those incapable themselves of wit, as unserious, as though to be serious one must always be in a fog. Cassity never writes a poem without knowing exactly what he means to say—crisply, pithily,...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Why Not Get Out of This Rut?' "Books offer what may be called a standing solution to the eternal and infernal Christmas-present...

a month ago

29

'Why Not Get Out of This Rut?'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

"Books offer what may be called a standing solution to the eternal and infernal Christmas-present problem.” Well, yes and no. I’m a graceless gift giver and receiver, especially when it comes to books. People like my middle son are inspired and have a knack for...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Be Able to Call It a Poem' A few poets are born into each generation. A measure of the rareness of their gift is...

a month ago

29

'Be Able to Call It a Poem'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

A few poets are born into each generation. A measure of the rareness of their gift is the proliferation of wannabes who make poetic gestures, relish the title “poet” and write undistinguished prose. I was given an issue of American Poetry Review, a magazine I haven’t looked at in...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'To Make Something Beautiful' “There have been many things I’ve tried to write about and could not. Things too serious, too...

2 months ago

29

'To Make Something Beautiful'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

“There have been many things I’ve tried to write about and could not. Things too serious, too painful, and that’s not the purpose of writing a poem. The point of poetry is to make something beautiful—something in itself. I’m not trying to pour my sorrows down on the page.” Janet...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'There Are No Millers Any More' I’ve just learned of the suicide of a woman I knew casually a long time ago. Such news is always...

a month ago

29

'There Are No Millers Any More'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

I’ve just learned of the suicide of a woman I knew casually a long time ago. Such news is always unsettling, as though a fundamental law of nature had been violated. Given what we know of the person, and it may be very little, we apply her circumstances to our own and conclude,...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'He's Not Pulling It Out of Thin Air' A friend tells me he is boycotting a favorite bookstore because, as he writes, “someone posted a...

10 months ago

29

'He's Not Pulling It Out of Thin Air'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

10 months ago

A friend tells me he is boycotting a favorite bookstore because, as he writes, “someone posted a fair-sized sign on the store’s ‘Community Board’ reading, ‘From The River to the Sea, Palestine Shall Be Free.’” There’s a naïvely childish part of me that finds the obscenity...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'He Does Not Make a Nice Old Man' A friend who is a great admirer of Thomas Carlyle sent me an excerpt from a letter the Scotsman...

10 months ago

29

'He Does Not Make a Nice Old Man'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

10 months ago

A friend who is a great admirer of Thomas Carlyle sent me an excerpt from a letter the Scotsman wrote to his mother on September 12, 1843: “I spent a forenoon with Jeffery who is very thin and fretful I think; being at any rate weakly, he is much annoyed at present by a hurt on...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'And the Third Is To Be Kind.' A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude (David R. Godine, 2002) is a collection of the...

a year ago

29

'And the Third Is To Be Kind.'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude (David R. Godine, 2002) is a collection of the late publisher/poet’s photographs of artists well-known and obscure. Williams was no snob when it came to talent and genius. He photographs Stevie Smith, Guy Davenport...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'They Fluttered Around Like Blue Snowflakes' As a former newspaper reporter I regularly read three hard-copy newspapers: The Leader, a...

a year ago

28

'They Fluttered Around Like Blue Snowflakes'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

As a former newspaper reporter I regularly read three hard-copy newspapers: The Leader, a neighborhood weekly here in Houston; the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal; and County Highway. That’s down from thirty years ago when I read seven or eight papers every day (like a...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'I Read You As I Listen to Rare Music' Rare is the writer who captures our imagination when we’re young and still assembling our personal...

6 months ago

28

'I Read You As I Listen to Rare Music'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

6 months ago

Rare is the writer who captures our imagination when we’re young and still assembling our personal canons, and remains rereadable for the rest of our lives. For me that would include Swift, Defoe and a third English novelist, a rather exotic import from Poland: Joseph Conrad. I...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'How to Live With Ourselves As We Are' “What’s essential is not Montaigne’s wisdom, but his wise recognition of his foolishness; not his...

4 months ago

28

'How to Live With Ourselves As We Are'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

“What’s essential is not Montaigne’s wisdom, but his wise recognition of his foolishness; not his virtue, but his good cognizance of his vices; not his ‘honesty,’ but his honesty, his complete leveling with the reader.” I tried a little experiment, a variation on bibliomancy. I...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'He Worked His Weaponed Wit' A reader is displeased: “Oh my aren’t you witty?” He/she was offended by something I had written a...

a year ago

28

'He Worked His Weaponed Wit'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

A reader is displeased: “Oh my aren’t you witty?” He/she was offended by something I had written a long time ago about Robert Bly. Granted, criticizing Bly is like shooting fish in the bathtub with a bazooka. I was a little ashamed of myself but that passed. My consolation is...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Whispering Parasite' In Act III, Scene 2 of Henry IV, Part 1, Prince Hal hopes to convince his father that he has mended...

11 months ago

28

'A Whispering Parasite'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

11 months ago

In Act III, Scene 2 of Henry IV, Part 1, Prince Hal hopes to convince his father that he has mended his ways, is a worthy successor and will in the future avoid the riff raff (“rude society,” the king calls them; i.e., Falstaff). Hal says: “So please your majesty, I would I...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Cloudy, Cloudy Is the Stuff of Stones' The best-known and still unchallenged refutation of the Irish Anglican Bishop George Berkeley’s...

10 months ago

28

'Cloudy, Cloudy Is the Stuff of Stones'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

10 months ago

The best-known and still unchallenged refutation of the Irish Anglican Bishop George Berkeley’s theory of subjective idealism – he called it “immaterialism” -- is recounted by James Boswell on August 6, 1763: “After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Writer As Illusionist' My review of William Maxwell’s The Writer As Illusionist: Uncollected and Unpublished Work (ed. Alec...

8 months ago

28

'The Writer As Illusionist'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

8 months ago

My review of William Maxwell’s The Writer As Illusionist: Uncollected and Unpublished Work (ed. Alec Wilkinson, Nonpareil Books, 2024) is published in the June issue of The New Criterion.

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Anecdotal Evidence

'We Find It Hard to Read Great Books at All' A young reader tells me he is unable to read most books written before “about the middle of the 60s....

9 months ago

28

'We Find It Hard to Read Great Books at All'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

9 months ago

A young reader tells me he is unable to read most books written before “about the middle of the 60s. I like Vonnegut. A lot of the stuff before that is like a foreign language to me.” I’m reminded of an English professor who told me more than half a century ago that most of her...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Still to Suruiue in My Immortall Song' Many of the best things in life, so long as they persist, are accompanied by a shadow of...

a month ago

28

'Still to Suruiue in My Immortall Song'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

Many of the best things in life, so long as they persist, are accompanied by a shadow of their disappearance. If fortunate, we learn this lesson early. Their transitoriness becomes part of their charm, whether a cat, a garden or a brother. We are grateful and enjoy them...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Nor, Quitted Once, Can It Be Quite Recalled' I think we have fetishized age thirteen. It’s linguistic: the first -teen, as though that were some...

2 months ago

28

'Nor, Quitted Once, Can It Be Quite Recalled'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

I think we have fetishized age thirteen. It’s linguistic: the first -teen, as though that were some rite of passage. I remember awaiting that age with trepidation, uncertain what was expected of me. I knew contemporaries who were already shaving and one who was pregnant. (Where...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Barricades Against Boredom' I’ve reminded my sons with tedious regularity that the world is densely populated with boring people...

a year ago

28

'Barricades Against Boredom'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

I’ve reminded my sons with tedious regularity that the world is densely populated with boring people and boring situations. Think of advertising, PowerPoint, golf, Marxists, super-hero movies, activists of any stripe, videogames and the novels of Joseph McElroy. That each of...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Half-Buried Sense for Poetry' It’s easy to mistake geniality for prevarication. So rare a quality seems suspicious or...

a month ago

28

'A Half-Buried Sense for Poetry'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

It’s easy to mistake geniality for prevarication. So rare a quality seems suspicious or naively unprofessional, a mask worn to conceal the shark within, especially among literary types. Of course, critics are born to be severe, nobody’s pal. How many critics can you name whose...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Fond of Books and Fond of Reading' A friend has loaned me his copy of Maurice Baring’s Have You Anything to Declare? (1936), subtitled...

10 months ago

28

'Fond of Books and Fond of Reading'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

10 months ago

A friend has loaned me his copy of Maurice Baring’s Have You Anything to Declare? (1936), subtitled A Note Book with Commentaries. This is the 1950 edition published by William Heinemann and comes with an indecipherable pencil inscription on the front end paper that may be...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Title Is Apt and Not a Whit Pretentious' I hadn’t opened my copy of Raymond Sokolov’s Wayward Reporter: The Life of A.J. Liebling (Harper and...

a month ago

28

'The Title Is Apt and Not a Whit Pretentious'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

I hadn’t opened my copy of Raymond Sokolov’s Wayward Reporter: The Life of A.J. Liebling (Harper and Row, 1980) in a long time. It’s a rather skimpy biography, though the only one we have, so I hope someone, someday writes a life worthy of Liebling’s gifts. When I was a...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Soul of Reading!' Don’t invariably mistake a digression for sloppy storytelling. True, a clumsy storyteller will...

3 months ago

27

'The Soul of Reading!'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

Don’t invariably mistake a digression for sloppy storytelling. True, a clumsy storyteller will digress out of sheer rambling confusion and indifference to his audience. My father was like that. We arrived at some destination and he would promptly relate the details of the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Future Spells Only Disaster' Several weeks ago in a post I wrote about Robert Conquest I referred to “the essential books...

a month ago

27

'The Future Spells Only Disaster'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

Several weeks ago in a post I wrote about Robert Conquest I referred to “the essential books published in the twentieth century,” and listed some of the titles deserving a place in that category. Most, I wrote, “are not found in the traditionally defined literary categories; that...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Till Love and Fame to Nothingness Do Sink' Dr. Johnson thought the first aim of biography was utilitarian: “I esteem biography, as giving us...

3 months ago

27

'Till Love and Fame to Nothingness Do Sink'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

Dr. Johnson thought the first aim of biography was utilitarian: “I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use.” The reader reads the life of another, reflects on it and applies the lessons he deduces to himself. In the early pages of his...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'I Successfully Pretend I Am a Human Being' A longtime reader is convinced we are enduring an imagination deficit. “Everywhere,” she writes, “I...

11 months ago

27

'I Successfully Pretend I Am a Human Being'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

11 months ago

A longtime reader is convinced we are enduring an imagination deficit. “Everywhere,” she writes, “I see clichés taking over. Obviously in public life with politicians and journalists. That’s nothing new but in the arts too, music and writing. It’s as though AI created them.” No...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Domestic Privacies" Marilyn Sides won this reader’s heart in the third paragraph of her 2018 essay “The Consolations of...

10 months ago

27

'Domestic Privacies"

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

10 months ago

Marilyn Sides won this reader’s heart in the third paragraph of her 2018 essay “The Consolations of Literature,” when she refers to Dr. Johnson as “grand master of English prose.” She also practices what Anecdotal Evidence preaches: “the intersection of books and life.” We might...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Single Line of Calm' Judged solely as a liquid asset, the most valuable book I ever held was a history of Argentina...

a month ago

27

'A Single Line of Calm'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a month ago

Judged solely as a liquid asset, the most valuable book I ever held was a history of Argentina borrowed from the public library in Schenectady, N.Y. At home I discovered the previous reader had marked his place with a twenty-dollar bill. I returned the book but not the cash. It...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'O Friend Unseen, Unborn, Unknown' Rabbi David Wolpe tells me Monday’s post reminds him of a poem, “To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence,”...

2 months ago

27

'O Friend Unseen, Unborn, Unknown'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

2 months ago

Rabbi David Wolpe tells me Monday’s post reminds him of a poem, “To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence,” by a poet I knew only by name: James Elroy Flecker. “I've always been moved,” David said, “especially by the penultimate stanza”: “O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'The Censure of Knaves and Fools' “Mr. Michael Johnson was a man of large and robust body, and of a strong and active mind; yet, as in...

4 months ago

27

'The Censure of Knaves and Fools'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

“Mr. Michael Johnson was a man of large and robust body, and of a strong and active mind; yet, as in the most solid rocks veins of unsound substance are often discovered, there was in him a mixture of that disease, the nature of which eludes the most minute enquiry, though the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'A Hundred Words for the Word Brother' One of the stranger events recounted by Montaigne: “[I]f I must bring myself into this, a brother...

3 months ago

27

'A Hundred Words for the Word Brother'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

3 months ago

One of the stranger events recounted by Montaigne: “[I]f I must bring myself into this, a brother of mine, [Arnaud, Lord of] Saint-Martin, twenty-three years old, who had already given pretty good proof of his valor, while playing tennis was struck by a ball a little above the...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Commonplace Insights' The Center for Popular Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio was founded in...

4 months ago

27

'Commonplace Insights'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

4 months ago

The Center for Popular Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio was founded in 1970, the year I entered BG as a freshman. Today it’s the only institution in the country to have a Department of Popular Culture. As an English major I hung around with professors who...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'I Used to Stand in Front of the Windows' In my dream I was staring through the window of a bookstore, worried that sunlight would bleach the...

a year ago

26

'I Used to Stand in Front of the Windows'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

a year ago

In my dream I was staring through the window of a bookstore, worried that sunlight would bleach the color from the cover of a book. At the center of a display that seemed to be made of cotton gauze was not just any book but a first edition of Ulysses. In the rare books collection...

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Anecdotal Evidence

'Pick Up a Machete and Start Exploring' A splendid day for American literature: born on March 1 are Ralph Ellison (1914), Howard Nemerov...

11 months ago

26

'Pick Up a Machete and Start Exploring'

from Anecdotal Evidence [alt+shift+b] in literature

11 months ago

A splendid day for American literature: born on March 1 are Ralph Ellison (1914), Howard Nemerov (1920) and Richard Wilbur (1921). I’m reminded of how important contemporary American writers were to me when I was young, in the 60s and 70s. Everything was new and promising, and I...

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Anecdotal Evidence