Friday, July 09, 2004



During a recent graduate seminar on 20th Century American Autobiography and Memoir, I found myself obliged, in the interest of civility, to swallow a fit of temper.
Deeply ironic, Saar's work speaks from a sort of existential nakedness, and gets beyond...Exclusion is the rule in binary practice (either/or), whereas poetics aims for the space of difference -- not exclusion but, rather, where difference is realized in going beyond. Read it before it is banned!

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: ACTION AND REACTION: It's Imitation Time
In Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson argues that ambiguity serves an indispensable function in poetry. When the disparate meanings of an ambiguous grammatical construction or word reinforce and enrich each other, the poet can achieve radically novel conceptual and emotional effects; but unhappy ambiguities, including those condemned as mixed metaphor, may be simply incoherent when the meanings are mutually impertinent or at odds. In his recent contribution to the history of ideas, which tracks the medieval word reaction and its more ancient correlate action from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, Jean Starobinski makes a similar argument about the metaphorical appropriation of terms.
Jean Starobinski's History of Reaction: The Uses and Dangers of Metaphorical Language [The most dangerous threats are right under our noses: If books could kill]
• Gene Deitch: A whole new area of work opened up for me just as the Soviet forces were breathing smoke around the borders of Czechoslovakia, and I made a film called The Giants that the communists banned for 20 years. For me, it was a point of pride: The Giants Win and Lose (Part 1): (Don’t Let a Little Thing Like Failure Stop You!)
• · See Also Our MPs can scarcely be accused of being bookish. Why then a plush library?
• · · Péter Esterházy's Celestial Harmonies A Cheeky Work of Postmodernist Genius
• · · · The Boston Globe: offers an amusing round-up of reviews of presidential memoirs
• · · · · See Also The attraction of strangers: partnerships in humanities research [Happy ever after - on separate floors Couples are increasingly finding that living apart is the best way to stay together ]
• · · · · · See Also Literacy in the new millennium