100 Best Poems to Memorize
Roughly ten years ago, Poet John Hollander put out a book of verse entitled Committed to Memory : 100 Best Poems to Memorize.read more
View ArticleI think Derrida called it Hymen, so it's time to pop your cherries boys.
I recently had an opportunity to re-read Dana Gioia's infamous essay "Can Poetry Matter?" after a blogger challenged my take on Gioia's involvement in the New Formalism posted here recently. It got me...
View ArticleKenneth Goldsmith and the Cult of Pretense & Boredom
The twentieth century began with a question about what art is. Artists like Duchamp, Tzara, Artaud, Beckett and Breton challenged conventional notions and forced audiences to examine a lot of...
View ArticleDon't Worry Keith, We Don't Like You Either
Keith Gessen doesn't like Lit Blogs. He also doesn't like McSweeney's or the Believer. He thinks lit bloggers are self-promoting whores who, unlike Keith Gessen, are selling our collective birthrights...
View ArticleCriticism in Our Digital Age
Rachel Cooke asks recently in an op-ed piece in The Guardian if we "amateur word spewers" would really do without Nick Hornby who Cooke feels has set the Gold Standard for criticism to which no lit...
View ArticleKelly Link, Pynchon, Moorcock and Genre
In a recent interview with Bat Segundo, Kelly Link offers some interesting comments about genre labels. She says that she feels like the term "Literary Fiction" turns off lots of people, and she...
View ArticleThe Future of the Fantastic: New Wave Slipstream Fabulism
It isn't so surprising that I didn't know what was going on in Science Fiction, as I'm the type of guy who generally reads "Literary Fiction," and like many readers of a particular type of writing, I...
View ArticleWhy n+1 is the Worst Literary Magazine on the Market
There's been a recent dust-up in the lit blogs over some criminally stupid things that n+1 printed about literary blogs. This after Keith Gessen's previous inflammatory remarks on the subject. One of...
View ArticleWhy "Racism = Prejudice + Power" Is The Wrong Way to Approach the Problems of...
Critical Race Theory is a popular pass-time among my comrades on the radical left who ascribe to various positions within the broad political ideology of identity politics. Since I'm a Marxist, or at...
View ArticlePlot Genre and the Pulp Fiction Boondoggle
Apparently yet again the mainstream critics have gotten it wrong, and not surprisingly it came out of Northeastern literary circles, whose stable of critics includes such dim luminaries as the...
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