Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
“We liked how Actress X played her part – we just didn’t like Director Y’s production.” Every now and then, critics write this – without noticing the contradiction within. More often than not, it turns out that Actress X excelled…
Reading Faramerz Dabhoiwala‘s review of three books on British imperial history, I saw this quote from 1911 concerning West Indians of color: …lazy, vicious and incapable of any serious improvement, or of work except under compulsion. In such a climate…
The Kremlin is persecuting its domestic opponents with unprecedented viciousness and is close to suppressing, almost completely, free political speech on social media platforms – but is obviously lacking in resolve when it comes to fending off the new coronavirus…
Here’s an extract from The Rainbow (1915) by D. H. Lawrence describing Will Brangwen’s infatuation with German religious art: These were the finest carvings, statues, he had ever seen. The book lay in his hands like a doorway. The world…
Adam Kirsch writes in the New Criterion: If millions of people think Rupi Kaur is a poet, comparing her to Wallace Stevens won’t convince them otherwise. I believe I understand correctly what Kirsch is saying here but I wish he…
Tortoises, consisting of six long, unrhymed poems by D. H. Lawrence, was printed in 1921 in New York City (by Thomas Seltzer). In Baby Tortoise, Lawrence writes: Voiceless little bird,Resting your head half out of your wimpleIn the slow dignity…
An interesting piece in The Guardian this morning, by Michael Safi (based in Beirut), Theo Merz (Moscow) and Helen Davidson (Taipei). “Why home-produced Covid vaccine hasn’t helped India, Russia and China rollouts.” As vaccinations rates soar in Israel, the UK,…
Looking away from the feisty conservatives to the opposite side of the political campground, consider Corey Robin’s tweet: Physical attractiveness is a charged topic. The ancients thought it was part of the social order, dividing elite from commoner. In the…
Jethro Bithell wrote in Contemporary French Poetry (1912): That poem is worth more than all the commentaries on symbolism. “Le chanson grise” (whether it means “gray song,” as some of my friends say, or “drunken song,” as others say —…
The Congo, I Presume? is a sculpture group by Tom Frantzen in the garden of the AfricaMuseum in Brussels. Zoey Poll writes in Lapham’s Quarterly: It’s hard to imagine that a passerby would pick up on the work’s supposed anticolonial…
Leonid Bershidsky wrote in his Bloomberg column almost two weeks ago (“The U.S. Capitol Riot Wasn’t a Gift to Putin”): Putin’s allies can claim, as they have already done, that for all its lip service to democracy the U.S. is…
This post, like my second post of the year 2021, has been prompted by Language Hat’s Lost Yiddish Words and its comments section. I’ll start with a quote from a 2011 post at Yiddish Word of the Week. Fascinatingly, at…