Archive for April, 2009

On the collected Seidel

Christian Lorenzten says Frederick Seidel emerges in his collected poems as a “reluctant but willful ambassador of American excess.”

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Boardinghouses, bedbugs, and John Cheever

Paper Cuts’ comments about 19th century boardinghouses and bedbug infestations, and — as people take in roommates to pay the bills and the scourge makes a comeback — the likely impending rise of both, called to mind John Cheever’s bedbug travails, as recounted in Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life. At the end of 1939, Cheever returned from a summer job . . .

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