A sad day for his family, his country, and for the literary world. I think his novel, Miss Jane is a masterpiece. Here’s what I said about it (on Amazon) in September 2019. Do you remember that scene in the movie version of The English Patient where Katherine lists for the sake of archeologists (and supporters of their project, all of them guys) gathered around a fire the several varieties of love? Romantic, filial, etc. Well, this novel, set in the…..

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I have mentioned this book in a previous blog (please have a look at it) and now the book is released in paperback: https://www.cambridgescholars.com/story-by-story. I won’t repeat the brief blurb I made about it earlier, but my co-author, philosopher Thomas Alderson Davis, and I are happy about this new form of availability.

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Many, I’m willing to bet, who love reading, have found themselves during this time thinking about, rereading, or looking at for a first time some one or more of literary pieces centered on or around an epidemic illness, the quarantine one has produced, or both. Katha Pollitt, for example, took up this theme recently in one of her columns in The Nation. I am no exception. I’ve two personal favorites, each Italian: Allesandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi and Giovanni Boccaccio’s…..

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The poem is in The New Yorker, its edition of 16 December 2019. Before encountering this poem, I’d been slow to come around to this poet. This brief work, though, wins me over completely. I’m a first-line guy: if that line doesn’t catch my interest, I’m done. Here’s Wiman’s on this occasion:    Three kinds of hair in the brush one love … I’m captured. It’s got gritty diction plus texture, the latter created by a combo of consonantal stops…..

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For The Laughing Heart—Revised Mr Johnson has succeeded in producing a thought provoking epic of family, love, baseball, good and evil. The Laughing Heart Revised challenges one to examine what we believe, what we hold sacred and what we profane. I was surprised how thoroughly I enjoyed this examination as this is not always a comfortable exercise. It is a book I am sure to revisit as the layers of evocative prose deserve further reflection.

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   This book of twenty-six poems was awarded the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize for 2018. An award well-deserved, indeed, in my opinion. Teicher’s poems here are principally about poetry itself, a literary art based on the line (a perspective with which I wholly agree), a fragment, and—in series even—incomplete. Here’s his way of putting it “ … how the line breaks before the thought is done, how the line, a partial thing, is the measure, and it’s…..

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   Here I will deal with Chapter 1 only, “Death.” In it Nagel takes up the question of whether anything may be said to be lost—has a misfortune occurred?—when someone has died, since the dead person no longer exists and therefore cannot feel loss of any sort. Why a psychiatrist  should take more interest than most people do in this question is immediately apparent when one thinks of the problem of suicide and its contemplation or planning, a problem so…..

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From Babel to Pentecost: The Poetry of Pierre Emmanuel By Mary Anne O’Neil   I have just been into this work of Mary Anne O’Neil’s, published in 2013. It is an exhaustive examination, translation, and explication of the works of a poet well known in France during and following World War II, one who was a devout Christian and made of his labors and life an exploration of what that faith meant, to him at least. The biographical aspects of O’Neil’s…..

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A topic on my mind, as I am re-reading Aristotle’s Poetics after many years. In the Author’s Note of the Inconclusive Rule, I make this comment: “… art—and surely poetry is no exception—has as its very purpose that of inciting an individual experience, experience that embodies the enigma of being an individual, uniquely alive and uniquely mortal. Since this enigma, one from the existential class of enigmatic things, is located upon the commons of humankind, all of humankind is joined…..

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Well, I have some excuse for the delay. Immediately on finishing the first draft of the book, I began, then fulfilled, a residency in psychiatry in Philadelphia. Next, I came home to Walla Walla, WA to busy myself for the next decade in a general practice of the specialty I had just trained for. Still, time, as you all know (or will soon enough) … time waits, as they say, for no one: I’m 77 now; it’s time for this…..

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