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That Wooden Leg

Michael Wood: Conversations with Don Luis, 7 September 2000

An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel 
translated by Garrett White.
California, 266 pp., £17.50, April 2000, 0 520 20840 4
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... gaiety.Buñuel likes some contemporary directors, but not many. American films, he says. Woody Allen. Stanley Kubrick. ‘That film with those shots of the man’s eye.’ ‘A Clockwork Orange?’ ‘That’s the one.’ Nice thought, coming from the man whose film career began with the image of an eye slashed by a razor. Buñuel tells me a Hitchcock ...

All the girls said so

August Kleinzahler: John Berryman, 2 July 2015

The Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 427 pp., £11.99, October 2014, 978 0 374 53455 4
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77 Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 84 pp., £10, October 2014, 978 0 374 53452 3
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Berryman’s Sonnets 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 127 pp., £10, October 2014, 978 0 374 53454 7
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The Heart Is Strange 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 179 pp., £17.50, October 2014, 978 0 374 22108 9
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Poets in their Youth 
by Eileen Simpson.
Farrar, Straus, 274 pp., £11.50, October 2014, 978 0 374 23559 8
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... for the New Criticism (espoused by Lowell and Jarrell’s teachers John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate). Eliot’s work seemed to embody modernism for those who came after, and younger poets were trying desperately to find a way to get clear of him. Schwartz was the most obviously influenced by Eliot and would suffer both personally and as a poet ...

Alonenesses

William Wootten: Alun Lewis and ‘Frieda’, 5 July 2007

A Cypress Walk: Letters to ‘Frieda’ 
by Alun Lewis.
Enitharmon, 224 pp., £20, October 2006, 1 904634 30 3
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... selection was included in the prose collection In the Green Tree (1948): ‘It may be,’ Walter Allen wrote in the New Statesman, ‘that these letters will ultimately take a higher place than either the poetry or the stories for, like Keats’s, they point to a maturity beyond anything their author had been able to express in his work.’ A heavily edited ...

This is how you smile

Ogazielum Mba: On Jamaica Kincaid, 8 February 2024

Lucy 
by Jamaica Kincaid.
Picador, 144 pp., £9.99, July 2022, 978 1 5290 7688 2
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At the Bottom of the River 
by Jamaica Kincaid.
Picador, 80 pp., £9.99, July 2022, 978 1 5290 7678 3
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The Autobiography of My Mother 
by Jamaica Kincaid.
Picador, 208 pp., £9.99, July 2022, 978 1 5290 7675 2
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Annie John 
by Jamaica Kincaid.
Picador, 160 pp., £9.99, July 2022, 978 1 5290 7712 4
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... description of the house in which the narrator lives becomes increasingly disconcerting: ‘the wood shingles, unpainted, weather-beaten, fraying: the piano, a piece of furniture now, collecting dust; the bed in which all the children were born; a bowl of flowers, alive, then dead; a bowl of fruit, but then all eaten’. Where is everyone now? There is ...

Progressive Agenda

John Brewer, 18 March 1982

The Watercolours and Drawings of Thomas Bewick and his Workshop Apprentices 
by Iain Bain.
Gordon Fraser, 233 pp., £125, July 1981, 0 86092 057 7
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... achievement was both technical and aesthetic. Unlike most earlier book illustrators, he worked in wood, not copper. He took a vernacular skill and made it into an art, transforming the rude woodcut which had formerly been relegated to the local tavern wall into an elegantly executed image of sufficient sophistication to find its way into a gentleman’s ...

Diary

Christopher Turner: Summerhill School and the real Orgasmatron, 3 June 2004

... as Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs – who claimed to have had a spontaneous orgasm in his. Woody Allen parodied it as the ‘Orgasmatron’ in Sleeper. I wondered what place such a machine would have in a school. What was it that united Neill and Reich, whose close friendship is recorded in their extensive correspondence? And why would such enlightened ...

Diary

Tariq Ali: The Future of Cricket, 12 March 2009

... Giles Clarke, and flanked by English cricketing legends (all Sky employees) lining up to greet Sir Allen Stanford’s helicopter as it landed on the nursery ground at Lord’s in 2007. The Texas-born, Caribbean-based billionaire (as he was described before we learned that much of his capital was fictitious) was greeted like a monarch. The fantasist from the ...

Peasants wear ultramarine

Barbara Newman: Nuns with Blue Teeth, 10 February 2022

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book 
by Elaine Treharne.
Oxford, 248 pp., £30, October 2021, 978 0 19 284381 4
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Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers 
by Mary Wellesley.
Riverrun, 372 pp., £25, October 2021, 978 1 5294 0093 9
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The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books 
by Elina Gertsman.
Penn State, 232 pp., £99.95, June 2021, 978 0 271 08784 9
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... scraping, stitching, sawing, smithing, singing, sighing, and … the smell and taste of guts and wood, fire and melting wax.’ Fortunately, no animals were harmed to produce the three works under review, each of which explores the materiality of the medieval book. Writing for a lay audience, Mary Wellesley introduces the collaborators ...

No Mythology, No Ghosts

Owen Hatherley: Second City?, 3 November 2022

Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain 
by Richard Vinen.
Allen Lane, 545 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 0 241 45453 4
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... in Birmingham than in Liverpool, Sheffield or Manchester.’ He suggests, via the writer Walter Allen (one of the few Birmingham intellectuals from a working-class background), that class consciousness might actually have been sharpened by knowing your own boss. The factory owner, for Allen, was ‘my enemy; he stands in ...

Little Lame Balloonman

August Kleinzahler: E.E. Cummings, 9 October 2014

E.E. Cummings: The Complete Poems, 1904-62 
edited by George James Firmage.
Liveright, 1102 pp., £36, September 2013, 978 0 87140 710 8
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E.E. Cummings: A Life 
by Susan Cheever.
Pantheon, 209 pp., £16, February 2014, 978 0 307 37997 9
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... he would enjoy until the end of life. He died there in 1962 of a brain haemorrhage while cutting wood, a month before his 68th birthday. At Harvard he roomed with John Dos Passos and could hardly have had a better time acting as boho, bolshy and radical as Harvard boys of that era were allowed to be, while at that same time calling attention to himself as an ...

An UnAmerican in New York

Lewis Nkosi: The Harlem Renaissance, 24 August 2000

Winds Can Wake Up the Dead: An Eric Walrond Reader 
edited by Louis Parascandola.
Wayne State, 350 pp., $24.95, December 1998, 0 8143 2709 5
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... by new forms of racial conflict. At the same time, America was preparing to enter the Great War. Wood-row Wilson lay half-paralysed in the White House; the socialist leader Eugene Debs was kicking his heels in an Atlanta prison cell; and an assortment of anti-war socialists and anarchist bombers were keeping J. Edgar Hoover and the Justice Department ...

The Unstoppable Upward

James Wolcott: ‘The Life of Saul Bellow’, 24 January 2019

The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005 
by Zachary Leader.
Cape, 864 pp., £35, November 2018, 978 0 224 10188 2
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... the pleasure of seduction with the purr of hearing his own voice. The prototype of a Woody Allen protagonist, he sought to furnish his protégées’ minds, groom their tastes, show them the world. (Bellow was suavely incorporated into the celebrity cast of Allen’s 1983 biopic spoof Zelig.) Leader’s rolling ...

Terrible to be alive

Julian Symons, 5 December 1991

Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life 
by William Pritchard.
Farrar, Straus, 335 pp., $25, April 1990, 0 374 24677 7
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Randall Jarrell: Selected Poems 
edited by William Pritchard.
Farrar, Straus, 115 pp., $17.95, April 1990, 0 374 25867 8
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... Warren it was glory all the way until he enlisted in the services a decade later. When in 1934 Allen Tate put together a poetry supplement for a magazine, it included several poets with firm reputations, but was headed by five poems from a twenty-year-old undergraduate named Jarrell. A published volume received respectful reviews, but it was as a critic ...

Places Never Explained

Colm Tóibín: Anthony Hecht, 8 August 2013

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht 
edited by Jonathan Post.
Johns Hopkins, 365 pp., £18, November 2012, 978 1 4214 0730 2
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... bombing crews – I feel sympathetic and sorry for both of them. Jarrell wrote to his wife about Allen Tate’s ‘Ode to Our Young Pro-Consuls of the Air’, a poem which ends with the Dalai Lama being exterminated from the air, saying it was ‘certainly poor and annoying … I thought the Dalai Lama almost the only touch of imagination.’ When he wrote ...

Bad News

Iain Sinclair, 6 December 1990

Weather 
by John Farrand.
Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 239 pp., $40, June 1990, 1 55670 134 9
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Weather Watch 
by Dick File.
Fourth Estate, 299 pp., £14.99, November 1990, 1 872180 12 4
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Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment 
edited by J.T. Houghton, G.J. Jenkins and J.J. Ephraums.
Cambridge, 365 pp., £40, September 1990, 9780521403603
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Crop Circles: The Latest Evidence 
by Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews.
Bloomsbury, 80 pp., £5.99, October 1990, 0 7475 0843 7
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The Stumbling Block, Its Index 
by B. Catling.
Book Works, £22, October 1990, 9781870699051
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... of Liberation for the Demystification of Violence at the Roundhouse. His sobering report had Allen Ginsberg and R.D. Laing, Trocchi, Michael X, and other disparate luminaries of the International Times devouring every word. We wanted to hear the worst, the spidery voice of doom: the prophetic voice of the Ancient of Days, Blake’s voice hallucinated in ...

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