1.) I want this book: Dies: A Sentence by Vanessa Place

2.) and this one: All Souls by Christine Schutt

3.) I’ll skip All the Sad Young Literary Men. What reader can stomach the phrase “the bitterness of my Harvard years?” From today’s review: “Next up is Keith. At least, I think he’s Keith. At first I thought it was Mark again, in the first person, but now I’m almost pretty sure it’s Keith. He has lots of girl trouble, too, and he hungers for status and sits around at Harvard worrying about ‘the roundedness of his character.’ Yet there is a kind of intellectual propulsion behind him: ‘My forefathers,’ he says, ‘had been huddled over Talmuds, then Soviet literary journals, for many generations.’ Keith’s roommate, Ferdinand, seems dedicated, in equal measure, to sleeping with women and to working out who is an idiot and who is not. Keith leaves Harvard and starts writing for some of those coveted liberal magazines. ‘Quickly I found some of the bitterness of my Harvard years dissipating, and the rest of it going straight into my prose.’ ‘A space of some sort had opened up in the universe,’ and he slips right into it, with a belief in his own ‘moral purity.’”

4.) “How to trivialise women’s poetry” in the Guardian: “Male poets grappling with life and death issues in their writing are dragon-slayers. Women embarked on such odysseys are rarely granted similarly heroic status. Instead, they’re victims, a less noble assignation which handily renders them more vulnerable to any criticism embedded with ulterior motives, and more susceptible to being undervalued and misunderstood, except in the context of a tragedy and/or their role as mother. Is this an avoidance of any serious examination of Plath’s work? Sadly this lack of critical engagement is how most women poets are viewed, or are not viewed, as is more the case. It’s no doubt naïve to want ability and talent to be the king-makers’ main criteria.” This is the best comment. Here again.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 11:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized.