Linkage

[erudito]

A nice A-Ha parody video.

A campaign to have the right to marry cartoon characters.

A new blog by two ANU academies on mainland SE Asia.

Arguing pro and con for a league of democracies.

Camille Paglia’s collection of poetry made it onto the US best-seller lists: she writes about poetry.

Reviewing a book on the new forms of anti-Semitism.

On

Comments

Camille Paglia

[bar_barra]

is as usual, a mixture of brilliantly incisive and wilfully blind. The best bit is her dissection of exactly what is wrong with modern poetry. She blames the crippling influence of the later Wallace Stevens. She is absolutely right. I once had a visiting Fulbright scholar in my office, who was doubtless amused to find himself being taught stuff he didn't know about Stevens by the magazine's business manager, and he didn't even know the early stuff. Let alone his crisis of of faith and the 6 years after Sea-Surface Full of Clouds in which he wrote nothing. What came after was mostly dreary guff, as she says. Though there are a few gems very late in life (Final Soliloloquy, Large Red Man Reading, etc), it is the dreary nonsense of Comedian As Letter C and New Haven which seized the Ivy league imagination. Oh dearie, dearie me.

For Auden she looked at, and rejected, Musee des Beaux Arts??? Well, yeah. It's not very good. Lady, try Sonnet 16 In Time of War. 1st September 1939 etc. And not a word about Dylan Thomas. (Don't start me!)

Nevertheless, to be 90% right is better than most pundits manage, so I suppose a round of applause is in order....