Treating metaphors as merelycolorful ways of saying things can irritate them, and sometimes they bite. In a local arts & culture magazine, an aricle about how hard it was to restore Emily Dickinson's house. It was helped by the discovery of some fragments of wall paper still adhering to surfaces. "Discovery of the wall paper fragments...lit a a ( Read more... )

I have every sympathey with myself here, thinking perhaps that my perplexity arose from the fact that I was actually not there at all.  Still I have to admire the grace, self-possession and dry wit with which I conducted myself.  I hope I was let off. Leave a comment  11 

If I read this right, you can get my new Harper's  "Easy Chair" essay (about how I did not go to Vietnam) for free as an inducement to subsribe. Enjoy!

http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/selective-service/

Adam Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker about Max Beerbohm, the paradigmatic beloved minor writer. "Beerbohm found so many ways to be modest that when he had to try and be major he couldn't." (Max assembled materials for a big Jamesian novel he got nowhere with.) "Still," Gopnik writes, there is no such thing as a minor writer, because--there is no ( Read more... )

From an article in the 0online NYRB by Glen H. Shepherd about photiographs of the now-nonexistent Selk'nam people of Tierra del Fuego: "There is something bewitchingly surreal about his photographs of the Hain initiation ceremony, in which young Selk’nam men are hazed by a pantheon of spirits that are revealed, in the final moments (forbidden to ( Read more... )

I'm glad to know that despite being a former cover star (whatever that is) I have not slaved uselessly as a wealth manager only to find it is not the way to riches.http://citywire.co.uk/wealth-manager/

The old, old question of Who are you? to one's own self grown strangely evasive
in the gloaming, and to God's world around to which one has never been really
introduced. Reading "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" for reasons that will be clear when my Harper's essay-after-next (November) appears.  It's the best example I know -- there are many -- of ( Read more... )

Watched Julie Taymor's Tempest last night. It was wonderful throughout, though (as is common now) a bit darker-hued than you'd expect. I was reminded of Max Reinhardt's 1930s film of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in the casting, assembled as in a dream -- Alfred Molina, David Strathairn, Chis Cooper (!), Alan Cumming, Tom Conti -- all doing classic ( Read more... )

Watched Julie Taymor's Tempest last night. It was wonderful throughout, though (as is common now) a bit darker-hued than you'd expect. I was reminded of Max Rheihardt's 1930s film of "Midsummer Night's Dream" in the casting, assembled as in a dream -- Alfred Molina, David Strathairn, Chis Cooper (!), Alan Cumming, Tom Conti -- all doing classic ( Read more... )

I enjoy the Times Litereary Supplement for a lot of reasons.  It reviews books that wouldn't be noticed in any general weekly.  It reviews books in languages other than English and quotes from them in the original, which even if I can't read is pleasant to encounter.  And it furnishes me every week with examples of how different British and ( Read more... )