Conspicuous Consumption

   Every so often it's good to give the brain a workout with some cutting-edge literary criticism. The Calamity of Form was, for me, good in that way. The argument, to the extent that I succeeded in following it, is that romantic poetry responded to the changing social conditions brought about by the industrial revolution by, in essence, not responding to it. That is, they used a variety of rhetorical moves—catachresis, obscurity, apostrophe—that rather than clarifying their response to the changes the industrial revolution brought about, obscured those changes. The poets achieved what Nersessian calls nescience , because the tools of the poet offered no plausible way to respond to the situation in which they lived. In the course of making her argument, which she does in clear lively prose, the author appeals not only to canonical romantic poets, but also to painters such as John Constable (his cloud paintings) and contemporary artists and musicians such as Kate Bush (clouds ...

 I enjoyed this book, but suspect I would have liked it even more when I was young person taking slow trains (Shout out to the Eurail pass!) around Europe. This is partly because it is a (lightly?) fictionalized account of just what it is like to be a young person wandering around Europe for no particular reason. While I did my wandering on my own or in the company of other temporarily rootless young people, de Terán's more sensational wanderings are in the company of a Venezuelan bank robber and two guerillas in exile who are his partners. She has married the bank robber on what can only be called a whim at the age of sixteen—he was about twenty years older—and follows in his wake for most of this novel. It's a pleasant ramble, mostly in Italy, but one does rather tire of the protagonist's almost complete lack of agency and her difficult to understand devotion to her not terribly pleasant husband. Apparently this is an early entry in the currently popular sub-genre that we...

Lauren Groff, in her excellent essay on Virginia Woolf's second novel,  Night and Day , compares it to the drawings Picasso did as a young man. Picasso's draftsmanship was not revolutionary; it was, however, superb: evidence that he had mastered the tradition. In much the same way, Woolf's novel is evidence that she was more than competent in the tradition that gave us the novels of Henry James and of Woolf's friend E.M. Forster. Like Picasso, she would go on to break the traditional mold. Night and Day is not as formally adventurous as her later work. It is, though, daring in its vision of English society moving from the Victorian era to the Edwardian, and especially what that might mean for women. The two women around whom the novel revolves, Katherine Hilbery and Mary Datchet, struggle to see how to live in the new world they are entering. Katherine, the granddaughter of a famous poet comes from a family that might now be called "bourgeois bohemian." They...

  Like most contemporary non-believers, I've always found Greek mythology more alluring than Christian mythology. John Milton has helped me to see that the Christian stories make for just as good reading as the adventures of Zeus and company. Of course, as many have noted—whether or not this is what Milton intended, and whether or not Milton's contemporaries would have read the character this way—for a modern reader, Satan is the most sympathetic character. He's ambitious and a lover of liberty: he doesn't want to be under the thumb of an autocratic god-the-father, and makes a valiant attempt to get out from under that thumb. It's hard, at least nowadays, to fault him for that. The main reason, though, that Milton's Satan is so attractive is that he is the most richly drawn of all the characters, and this depth makes him fascinating in ways the other characters are not. Adam and Eve, for example, seem of little account, mere pawns (for all the big guy's clai...

 Marc Behm wrote the screenplay for Help! . His novel,  The Eye of the Beholder , has the same manic energy as that classic piece of madcappery.  It is an account of a private eye known only as the Eye  who is both looking for the daughter who he hasn't seen since his wife left him when the girl was one year old—his absent wife sends him a picture eight years later of little girls in a classroom and taunts him by pointing out that he won't know which one of them is his daughter—and a woman who is in the habit of seducing men, and then killing and robbing them. His relationship with this murderer quickly changes. She is at first his quarry, but then he becomes a sort of guardian angel for her, following her, stalking her, observing her life as she pinballs around the United States and, unbeknownst to her, helping to ensure that she gets away with her crimes. It's undeniably true that the great realist novels of our time are detective novels, but this is not one of tho...

 Nobody could ever like or dislike the poetry of Robert Kelly because it is this or that kind of poetry. His poetry is simply too various to make that sort of categorical judgement possible. He writes different kinds of poems over the thirty-three years covered in this book, but but also within each of those thirty-three years. For example, drawn from a 1978 book called Convections we find exquisite observations of nature, as in the first stanza of "The Acquisition":      I saw the web resplendent strung      in the crotch of a prostrate bay tree      so what little sunlight filtered down      through redwoods found its way here,      to be proclaimed & multiplied upon the strands      moulded by a small body, its house and instrument.  But we also find in the same book more elliptical, more cryptic offerings:      The Last Religion      and the pier ...

   Mary A, Ward , who wrote under her married name, Mrs. Humphry Ward and founded the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League, takes great pains to tell us in her introduction to this edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall , that Anne Brontë is not the writer that her sisters, Emily and Charlotte were.  She's not wrong. The novel starts out well enough. We meet the mysterious tenant, a woman living alone with her young son in the dilapidated hall of the title and supporting herself by her art. That her life is hard, but that she is making it, in a way that few ladies did in those times, is the first evidence we have that this might be, as it has been called, the first feminist novel. When we learn more about her backstory, that she had deserted her cad of a husband and is hiding out from him for fear that he will take the child from her, this characterization of the book seems even more apt. "The slamming of [the protagonist Helen's] bedroom door against her husband re...