For Anne Carson In the second book of the Iliad, he calls him a mighty king: λάσιον κῆρ – in Rieu’s prose: “Pylaemenes of the shaggy breast led the Paphlagonians”. In the Fifth Book, he decides to have him killed – without too much fuss, in just two lines: “the great spearman Menelaus son of…
Lower your eyes. When beauty invades your life with such force, it can destroy you. The two ants hurrying along next to the soles of your feet are burying their summer dreams deep in the ground. The load they are carrying will not crush them. They have measured their strength accurately. Your shadow melts into…
The ambition that burned in the breasts and the brushes of the immigrant artists at La Ruche was not enough to warm them on winter nights. Hunger is what lured them to Paris and hunger is what kept them there, a zealous hunger that fortified them against the physical hunger which incessantly rumbled in the…
Under new management, Your Majesty: Thine. John Berryman I “And the king went up to the house of the Lord, and all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with him, and the priests, and the prophets, and all the people, both small and great; and he read in their ears all…
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. …The cat walked stiffly…
In the final weeks of World War I, Oswald Spengler published Der Untergang des Abendlandes, tamely translated as The Decline of the West. Its almost a thousand pages of turgid Teutonic prose swept over mangled Europe like a tidal wave, becoming the still-young century’s best-seller. (A second volume was published in 1922, to less rapturous…
The conventional belief about the well-known dichotomy of duties and rights is that the former are premodern and the latter are modern. Some have celebrated “the age of rights” while others express concern that modernity takes “rights talk” too far. There is a human rights movement, as if duties require none. The last American secretary…
Osip Mandelstam’s Conversation About Dante is the major Russian work on the great Florentine poet. Ever since it appeared, and perhaps even before it did, we have known that this conversation would turn out to be about something different: about “time and the self,” as another poet wrote. Dante’s optical devices, his mirrors and his…
The great historian C. Vann Woodward, author of The Strange Career of Jim Crow, a book that Martin Luther King, Jr. described as the “historical bible of the civil rights movement,” recount not just as an icon for ‘untouchables’ bus in his autobiography how the writing of the book came to be shaped by an…
What Fiddler on the Roof is for most American Jews — an emotional bull’s-eye on any family’s saga that began in a shtetl and wound up in the United States — The Lehman Trilogy is for me. My family, like the Lehmans, came here from Germany in the early nineteenth century. Both families left the…
After the smooth up-pull the car dove fish-efficient in the tractor-trailer’s wake. By then the thick wheel cuts had tapered down the long, curved grade then vanished, leaving undulations in the drifts. All the way from Montreal through French-toned Vermont we’d held to mostly all alone through night-time Massachusetts, the Berkshires rhythmic now, the rise…
Then, the future was glaucomic, the bore through mangrove in the dugout slow. I recall the water in its color tannic. I see now an olive wake dissolving from the churn work of the screw. A time would come — it seems it has — to redecipher, understand again the meaning of the motor’s open…
