Themes & Projects

Mysteries, December 2008–January 2009

Maritime literature, January–March 2009

Melville read-through, part I, TypeeWhite-Jacket, December 2009–January 2010

Whirlwind tour of Russian literature, February–May 2010

Epistolary literature, July 2009–June 2010

Short stories


Authors

“Just as no one ever says: ‘We are breathing!’ in spite of the fact that breath is coming and going all the time.”

I said in a comment on Monday that sometimes I’ve felt almost under a spell reading these D.H. Lawrence stories and novellas. My mood ends up somehow more open to his psychological flights, and I think at least part of it has to do with how well I feel he sets up the scene [...]

Daughters of the Vicar by D.H. Lawrence

I continued my recent D.H. Lawrence binge over the weekend with Daughters of the Vicar, a tiny novella about a poor but proud vicar’s family. All the early Lawrence stories I’ve been reading lately focus on contrasts, and this is no exception. Usually the contrasts are just between a man and a woman—“just,” ha!—but [...]

Strong and ruddy and beautiful…and strong, and ruddy, and beautiful

When I wrote about D.H. Lawrence’s The Fox, I mentioned that Henry is “cunning, sly, shrewd, stealthy,” but I didn’t really explain about the repetition of descriptions like this throughout the story. But based on my recent reading of The Fox and the stories in Wintry Peacock (and failure to remember much of anything [...]

Amos Barton by George Eliot

The Sad Fortunes of the Revd Amos Barton was, according to its introduction, George Eliot’s “first work of narrative fiction”—a novella really, not a novel.

The Revd Amos Barton is the curate in a small English town, and as always a central feature of the small English town is its gossip. Gossip is one [...]

On The Theory of Moral Sentiments, post the first

I haven’t been totally keeping up with the Theory of Moral Sentiments book club, but I have been doing the reading bit at least. I’m through Part I.

Before even getting into the content, I have to say how much I was struck by what an enjoyable read it is. I suspect the appeal [...]

On the organized and disorganized tourist

The first scene of The Dud Avocado finds Sally Jay Gorce unexpectedly meeting an acquaintance from America, Larry Keevil, and having a drink with him at a café. He outlines for her the four types of tourists, which fall into two categories. We have:

The Organized

The Eager-Beaver-Culture-Vulture, who has “the list ten yards [...]

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

Every once in a while a cover or a description of an NYRB title will put me off and make me think it’s not quite for me. I’d been hearing pretty good things around the internets about The Dud Avocado but I kept thinking, “The dud avocado?” Plus the whole, young American girl runs [...]

Sunday Salon

What a hectic weekend! I feel like I spent the whole thing driving around, running errands, and socializing with the CP’s fam. It was completely fun but completely tiring. And then, instead of falling into do-nothing mode as soon as I could, I actually did all my tax prep stuff instead of waiting even [...]

Spring fever

And I mean that literally. I don’t seem to have much good illness-reading lying around, so I’ve been watching movies and tooling around the internets.

Via MR, a post on measuring whether a classical composer is over- or undervalued. That’s a bit of a contentious way to word it, but check out the lists.

[...]

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber

I cannot deny that I am a bit of a sucker for attractive matching books—bonus points if they are small—so this weekend when I found myself wandering among the essays published by Prickly Paradigm Press a couple of them followed me home. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology was for me.

David Graeber presents in [...]