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Words as Amulets

Ange Mlinko: Barbara Guest’s Poems, 3 December 2009

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest 
edited by Hadley Haden Guest.
Wesleyan, 525 pp., £33.95, July 2008, 978 0 8195 6860 1
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Women, the New York School and Other True Abstractions 
by Maggie Nelson.
Iowa, 288 pp., £38.50, December 2007, 978 1 58729 615 4
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... without air, the lid being down, so to speak, a 1912 fragrance sifting to the left corner where we read ‘La Merveille’ and escape. (‘Roses’) Guest died in 2006, and this Collected Poems amasses work from more than 20 books. She also wrote art and poetry criticism, a novel and a biography of the Imagist poet H.D. She became known as a poet in the ...

Wangling

Hermione Lee: Katherine Anne Porter, 12 February 2009

Collected Stories and Other Writings 
by Katherine Anne Porter, edited by Darlene Harbour Unrue.
Library of America, 1039 pp., $40, October 2008, 978 1 59853 029 2
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... Shakespeare & Company: One evening a crowd gathered in Sylvia’s bookshop to hear T.S. Eliot read some of his own poems. Joyce sat near Eliot, his eyes concealed under his dark glasses, silent, motionless, head bowed a little, eyes closed most of the time, as I could plainly see from my chair a few feet away in the same row, as far removed from human ...

Blackfell’s Scarlatti

August Kleinzahler: Basil Bunting, 21 January 1999

The Poet as Spy: The Life and Wild Times of Basil Bunting 
by Keith Alldritt.
Aurum, 221 pp., £19.95, October 1998, 1 85410 477 2
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... really has the power to renew itself, I’d better write something for these younger chaps to read ... I planned a longish poem, about 750 lines, which I finished about a month ago and have just revised and sent off to Poetry Chicago today. I believe it is the best thing I’ve done.’ As we close in on the centenary of Basil Bunting’s birth at ...

Total Knowledge

Peter Campbell, 10 September 1992

Hypertext 
by George Landow.
Johns Hopkins, 242 pp., £35, April 1992, 0 8018 4281 6
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... up with them, but the memory of what it is like to do philosophy or geology remains; and when I read about debates that are going on in these areas I believe I know, even if I cannot follow it all, what kind of row or celebration is taking place. Subject-styles, back then, were well reflected in the content of bookshelves. The geologists had ...

Blunder around for a while

Richard Rorty, 21 November 1991

Consciousness Explained 
by Daniel Dennett.
Little, Brown, 514 pp., $27.95, October 1991, 0 316 18065 3
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... order – Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland – one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won’t work, which strategies are dead and which still alive. Bad questions have been ...

St Marilyn

Andrew O’Hagan: The Girl and Me, 6 January 2000

The Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe 
Christie’s, 415 pp., $85, September 1999, 0 903432 64 1Show More
The Complete Marilyn Monroe 
by Adam Victor.
Thames and Hudson, 339 pp., £29.95, November 1999, 0 500 01978 9
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Marilyn Monroe 
by Barbara Leaming.
Orion, 474 pp., £8.99, October 1999, 0 7528 2692 1
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... we that love her so much? These questions rise and fall like the sound of distant applause as you read the Christie’s catalogue. And occasional answers can seem to spring from the pictures and descriptions of the objects themselves. The book is a slick and a morbid affair: the clothes are really nothing without Marilyn in them; many of the photographs show ...

Secret Purposes

P.N. Furbank, 19 September 1985

Defoe and the Idea of Fiction: 1713-1719 
by Geoffrey Sill.
Associated University Presses, 190 pp., £16.95, April 1984, 0 87413 227 4
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The Elusive Daniel Defoe 
by Laura Curtis.
Vision, 216 pp., £15.95, January 1984, 0 85478 435 7
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Dofoe’s Fiction 
by Ian Bell.
Croom Helm, 201 pp., £17.95, March 1985, 0 7099 3294 4
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Realism, Myth and History in Defoe’s Fiction 
by Maximillian Novak.
Nebraska, 181 pp., £21.55, July 1983, 0 8032 3307 8
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... much as to say that, over the centuries, the common reader, who (it is a hundred to one) has never read the Farther Adventures, has not been in a position to appreciate Robinson Crusoe. A more plausible ethical interpretation is proposed by Laura Curtis in The Elusive Daniel Defoe. It is that we are to relate the island life constructed by Robinson Crusoe to ...

A Bit Like Gulliver

Stephanie Burt: Seamus Heaney’s Seamus Heaney, 11 June 2009

Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney 
by Dennis O’Driscoll.
Faber, 524 pp., £22.50, November 2008, 978 0 571 24252 8
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The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney 
edited by Bernard O’Donoghue.
Cambridge, 239 pp., £45, December 2008, 978 0 521 54755 0
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... and ‘the smell of hay still opens a path to the farthest and fondest places in me.’To read Heaney’s memories of his early life is to find not only rural, familial experience (hauling sacks of grain, buying eggs from ‘the egg man’ and the like) but rural and local words: ‘A “groop” [was] a sunk trench in the concrete floor … to drain ...

Down with DWEMs

John Sutherland, 15 August 1991

ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education 
by Charles Sykes.
St Martin’s, 304 pp., $9.95, December 1989, 0 312 03916 6
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Tenured Redicals: How politics has corrupted our Higher Education 
by Roger Kimball.
HarperCollins, 222 pp., $9.95, April 1991, 0 06 092049 1
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... agonise about their great texts being predominantly Anglo-European.) Can an African-American read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a ‘great book’ and nothing more? There was much agitation. Banners were unfurled (mainly for the benefit of the press) proclaiming ‘Get your racist education at Stanford.’ The acronym DWEM (dead white European ...

Ariel goes to the police

Karl Miller, 4 December 1986

Life is elsewhere 
by Milan Kundera, translated by Peter Kussi.
Faber, 311 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 571 14560 4
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My First Loves 
by Ivan Klima, translated by Ewald Oser.
Chatto, 164 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 7011 3014 8
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... with a marvellous world of concealment, the possibility of a second existence.’ Much later we read: ‘Everything seemed to indicate that Jaromil’s enormous yearning for newness (the religion of the New) was only the disguised longing of a virginal youth for the unimaginable experience of the sex act. When he first reached the blissful shore of the ...

Lend me a fiver

Terry Eagleton: The grand narrative of experience, 23 June 2005

Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme 
by Martin Jay.
California, 431 pp., £22, January 2005, 0 520 24272 6
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... in fact, since there seems to be nothing that this formidably erudite historian has not read. Just as the concept of experience seems to cover everything, so Jay’s intellectual landscape is innocent of frontiers between art and sociology, philosophy and political theory. Specialism, fragmentation and the division of labour have often enough been ...

At the Palazzo Venier

Nicholas Penny: Peggy Guggenheim’s Eye, 9 May 2002

Peggy Guggenheim: The Life of an Art Addict 
by Anton Gill.
HarperCollins, 506 pp., £25, October 2001, 0 00 257078 5
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... should be represented, whether by loan or by purchase, was drawn up by her chief adviser, Herbert Read. According to Guggenheim, it was later revised by ‘Marcel Duchamp, Nelly van Doesburg and myself because it contained so many mistakes’. Works by many of the artists on the list were acquired in Paris just before the outbreak of the Second World ...

I live in my world

Barry Schwabsky: Willem de Kooning, 22 September 2016

Willem de Kooning Nonstop: Cherchez la femme 
by Rosalind Krauss.
Chicago, 154 pp., £22.50, March 2016, 978 0 226 26744 9
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... ignorant verve he wanted as a painter and that he strove to portray in person. He knew and had read plenty, but preferred to play the innocent, the observant but befuddled immigrant who could manifest his naivety in the act of denying it: ‘I’m not a – how do you say that? – country dumpling.’ Among the most suggestive aspects of Krauss’s ...

Opprobrious Epithets

Katrina Navickas: The Peterloo Massacre, 20 December 2018

Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre 
by Jacqueline Riding.
Head of Zeus, 386 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 1 78669 583 3
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... from the upstairs window of a house overlooking the site, issued a warrant for Hunt’s arrest and read the Riot Act, though it is unlikely that anyone heard them. Shortly after the meeting started at one o’clock, the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry cavalry (consisting of volunteers recruited from local publicans and shopkeepers) charged into the ...

Favoured Irregulars

Andy Beckett: The Paras, 24 January 2019

Our Boys: The Story of a Paratrooper 
by Helen Parr.
Allen Lane, 382 pp., £20, September 2018, 978 0 241 28894 8
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... how the Paras’ reputation fell further during the rest of the 1970s. ‘Paras = evil bastards’ read one piece of graffiti in Belfast; at the same time, dozens of these supposedly elite soldiers were killed in IRA ambushes. In 1977 – because of defence cuts, and because of their unpopularity with the rest of the army – the Paras were reduced to three ...

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