Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Another author whom I willingly read even as I claim to despise his writing is Charles Dickens. Here, my distaste is not specific to Dickens but directed generally at Victorian novelists and, because it is directed generally, is more obviously a function of taste than of an objectively grounded theoretical claim.
I return again to the image and wonder if an older man wearing a mask and carrying a book about grief isn’t emblematic of our times. During the pandemic, there are ways in which we all have experienced loss.
Most often we speak of colonization as the incursion of a people onto a land that doesn’t belong to them, and the seizure of its resources, but before that comes the mastery of the subject people’s minds.
Bergen is willing to investigate the quiet moments that stitch together experience while eschewing the tendency to give greater weight to the momentous events.
One could easily imagine the principal character here, Morris Schutt, meeting Barney Panovsky in a hotel bar and, together, the two of them putting a serious dent in a bottle of McCallan.
In a way, Bergen is the perfect author to read during a pandemic lockdown. History may record the Covid-19 global pandemic as a dramatic crisis worthy of its own straight-to-Netflix movie. But sitting here in the midst of it, I experience it not so much as a crisis as I do a chronic state to be endured.
For me, what drives the comparison [to Denis Johnson] more deeply is the style of the writing. Both writers deploy a crisp detached prose that is perfectly suited to evince an emotionally lost protagonist looking from the outside in.
To the extent that our reality is increasingly defined by our connection to virtual environments, the function of our (facial) identity will be increasingly restricted to concerns of social control and commercial opportunity.
For me, books only gain significance as they fall into conversation with other books or as they enlarge the space available for conversation with the wider world. There is no book, only books.
As in The Lonely City, Laing views today’s funny weather as a continuation of gusts we felt in the early days of AIDS when the Reagan administration chose not merely to do nothing but actively to make life miserable for hundreds of thousands of those infected.
This tetralogy is a remarkable achievement, offering a clear-eyed view of the times without resorting to the usual maudlin emotions—outrage, disbelief. Instead, through her wise art, she offers us reassurance.
The title shares its name with a 1936 musical featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. One of the numbers is a Jerome Kern tune “Bojangles of Harlem” in which Astaire appears in blackface.
In chapter 32 of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë offers a curious passage, in which St. John Eyre Rivers offers Jane a volume of poetry. The volume, it turns out, is Scott’s Marmion, which was published almost forty years before Jane Eyre.
Every year begins with certain literary rituals. The first is to pay homage to Public Domain Day – the acknowledgment of literary works which have passed into the Public Domain and therefore are no longer subject to copyright law. Because copyright terms vary from country to country, one must be careful.
A year and a half ago, Toronto-based Kobo launched a bare bones eReader to give its biggest competitor, Amazon, a run for its money. It was a decent offering supported by a decent library (2.2 million titles and counting) especially when you consider the behemoth it was battling.