Tag Archives: reading

‘Cry of Pain’

Posted on April 15, 2021 by JMN

Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young” ruefully ironizes over a lad clever enough to “slip betimes away / From fields where glory does not stay.” Novelists, though, get more mileage out of superannuated jocks — Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, Malamud’s Roy … Continue reading →

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Virago

Posted on December 21, 2020 by JMN

A correspondent said she was reading a “virago book.” I said. “Is it by, or about, one?” It turns out Virago is a distinguished publishing house. As if on cue, this informative review of Lennie Goodings’s memoir appears. Virago started … Continue reading →

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‘Kate Is There in the Shadows’

Posted on November 17, 2020 by JMN

Here is narrative from a 1960 American novel. A character ascends a staircase to the mezzanine of a house to join another person there: There comes to me in the ascent a brief annunciatory syllable in the throat stopped in … Continue reading →

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‘A Fond Infected Look’

Posted on October 8, 2020 by JMN

A novelist’s prose can crowd poetry turf with an ineffability that thwarts paraphrase. Of his mother a protagonist says: “Ten minutes she will spend in the kitchen working with her swift cat-efficiency, then out and away with the children, surging … Continue reading →

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‘Whenever I Feel Bad…’

Posted on October 6, 2020 by JMN

Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred that one bears for the other. In … Continue reading →

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‘I Hate Men’ Two

Posted on September 10, 2020 by JMN

There’s more to Pauline Harmange, French author of I Hate Men, than met the eye of Ralph Zurmély, the gender equality ministry adviser who sought to prosecute her for incitement of gender-based violence. His ministry said “it appeared [he] had … Continue reading →

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Pen Pricks

Posted on September 9, 2020 by JMN

In certain Victorian novels, female authors paint a bleak picture of limited options available to women lacking means or family status; of a lonely and loveless existence, yet one lacking privacy and subject to uninvited comment; of a life peopled … Continue reading →

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Friday Morning

Posted on September 4, 2020 by JMN

I’m struggling. My remote interlocutor in life of the mind is keeping me afloat insofar as having a rational dialog with someone. But that dialog is private. Of the muchness on my mind, I’m conflicted as to which of it … Continue reading →

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The Gargoyles’ Grin

Posted on August 30, 2020 by JMN

In 1915, Wallace Stevens offered Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry (the magazine), several poems that included Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock. “She returned them… finding them ‘recondite, erudite, provocatively obscure… all with ‘a kind of modern-gargoyle grin to them,’” writes Stevens … Continue reading →

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Prosodic Moments in Poeisis

Posted on August 23, 2020 by JMN

In English, the difficulty of perceiving even brief isosyllabic lines as rhythmically equivalent is aggravated by the inordinate power of stressed syllables… The mashup of mystification about versifying that’s available online furnishes what I call Prosodic Moments — when phraseology … Continue reading →

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