Nikki Giovanni recalls Virginia Tech shooter
Poet Nikki Giovanni, a Virginia Tech professor, expressed concerns last fall about shooter Cho Seung-Hui’s intimidating poems and behavior. She delivered a memorial speech yesterday.
Poet Nikki Giovanni, a Virginia Tech professor, expressed concerns last fall about shooter Cho Seung-Hui’s intimidating poems and behavior. She delivered a memorial speech yesterday.
The Blue Hour, a Jean Rhys biography named for her favorite perfume, was due out early this year, but so far there are only rolling tumbleweeds.
In college I kept a journal — now destroyed, obviously, along with most incriminating photos — in which I evinced a penchant for copying out overwrought quotations from Flaubert’s letters. I’ve forgotten most of them, but a particular favorite (from a letter to his lover) was: “What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are . . .
As if I didn’t loathe Fox News enough already: “By the late ’70s, Vonnegut was rich and irrelevant, the subject of other people’s books, and a sacred cow of the New York literary scene.”