Archive for May, 2010

Words in air

Even if we didn’t have Elizabeth Bishop’s and Robert Lowell’s letters to each other, we would have their conversations in poetry. See previously.

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2005 wants its cultural debate back

I doubt I would have been so ticked off at Garrison Keillor’s death-of-publishing op-ed this morning if a friend hadn’t called yesterday to tell me how insulted she was by similar comments he made at a recent Authors Guild gala, but seeing newspapers endorse this sort of twaddle does get tiresome. Judy Berman invited me to elaborate on my Twitter . . .

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Kingsley Amis v. John Keats

In what he later called “a rather clever undergraduate essay,” Kingsley Amis argues that Keats was not a great poet, just “an often delightful, if often awkward, decorative [one].”

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Organizational feat, or technological boondoggle?

Organization, as you may recall, is not a virtue I possess in excess. And it depresses me when plans are drawn up and fail. So I hadn’t attempted to outline my novel draft in a couple of years. Now that the project has changed so fundamentally, though, I decided to spend a couple hours this weekend mapping out the story . . .

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