Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems was dedicated to Robert Creeley who was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, in1926. He entered Harvard in 1943 but left school to serve in the American Field Service in Burma and India dur...

Shockingly, a novel about a Nazi officer who abets murder squads, transports Jews to Auschwitz, has sex with his twin sister, possibly kills his parents and then dies rich, old and reflective has caused a trans-Atlantic controversy among literary critics. Published in the original French three years...

Writing in The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier offers a response to the Feb 25 piece in the NYTimes: In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth. His argument is worth a read, and here is one lengthy money quote: The complaint against the humanities is that they are impractical. This is ...

Figure 1. Dr. Manhattan working to isolate a "gluino." “…and he’s American” (IV.13).  His backstory comes straight out of a Marvel comic, a company famous for its heroes who are made so by exposure to some form of atomic energy.  He begins life as Jon Osterman, a ...

BLOG We're Social Creatures, For Better and For Worse Image of homelessness from the now-defunct Italian blog Moving & Learning. F or a million years, the desire for social interaction with other humans has been coded into our DNA, because social human groups survive better than lone wolves. Not...

Watchmen subverts the superhero mythology, depriving the world of selfless heroes striving to live lives of virtue. Its costumed crime fighters don’t struggle with wielding power responsibly or grapple with their own weaknesses in the hope of overcoming them. The Watchmen include a brutal sociopat...

Pervaiz Munir Alvi Even though there was nothing remarkable about him, still every body knew Bakka Gujjer. Those were the days when many in our neighborhood kept a milk cow or a buffalo at their homes. Bakka was their sole trusted community cow-hand. At the crack of the dawn he would show up at our ...

"Little deathSly as junkStrong as deathSweet as loveMake me danceMake me singBuy you a death's headDiamond ring" Though normally I don't cross=post full reviews between this blog and DVD Talk, I have decided to post my review of Elegy, the adaptation of The Dying Animal by Philip Roth, here since I ...

I recently read Katherine Hepburn's first book, The Making of The African Queen, or, How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall, and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind, released in 1987. I lucked into the importance of Hollywood biography when Best Friend Ben gave me The Grove Book of Hollywood for Christ...

A friend sent me the text of a recent WSJ editorial entitled “Will This Crisis Produce a ‘Gatsby’?� I’ll link to it later—for now I want to recreate my bad-faith reading experience in all its glory.  My first reaction was to the title, even though I know authors never write their own ti...