Yes, there’s a halcyon quality to The Dangerous Book for Boys, after all, in the main, children hardly learn history these days, grow up mostly without a well rounded education that includes Latin and grammar, don’t know how to make a…
A review of The Book of Hopes and Dreams, Dee Rimbaud (ed)
In a world frequently divided, supporting our “fellow man” is the keystone of civilization. The Book of Hopes and Dreams has been compiled to raise funds for Spirit Aid, which provides medical services to the people of Baglan Province. So Dee Rimbaud’s The…
A review of The Weather Man edited by Matt Ward
The Weather Man contains twenty-seven stories, and there’s a kind of similarity between them—nearly all of the stories contain a hard twist towards the end, and although there are a couple of exceptions, most are rooted in the psychological transformation of…
Lightness and Beauty: Skye’s “Tell Me About Your Day”
In “What’s Wrong with Me,” an impressionistic song suggesting resistance to embracing everything in modern life, Skye sings, “I try not to think about the rain /I try not to think about the evil empires and stupid fools.” It is…
Traditions, Transformations: Leela James, A Change Is Gonna Come
Leela James: and her complex aims, one of the beautiful dames, besieged by seductive games, knowing predictability maims, talent names, success tames.… A Change Is Gonna Come has a rich, warm sound—vintage. Within its exploration of love, there’s another interlude, “Married,” in…
Impaled on Beauty. A review of The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld
While The Man of My Dreams is set up as a coming-of-age novel, Hannah’s growth is primarily physical rather than emotional. Although it is a rather unsatisfying read in that sense, there are many aspects to this capable narrative which make it…
A Musician Who Lays Claim to the World: Caetano Veloso’s “Foreign Sound” and his “Best”
One hears the plucking of guitar strings and orchestral swirls, and Caetano Veloso’s voice is both light and grave. It’s fun to hear him sing Cobain’s “Come As You Are,” which was first recorded by the band Nirvana, and contains sharp contradictions, suggesting not confusion but an aware and complex mind. Veloso uses both a falsetto voice and a low, declamatory voice to interpret “Feelings,” making a song that had become a cabaret cliché sound like a genuine human expression.
A review of The Essential Barbra Streisand and Guilty Pleasures
When not practical, and even practicality has its deceptions, many people think in clichés, and even feel in clichés, and at their most rigorous they simply use one cliché to interrogate another, but in every generation, in every age, there are a few original people—and Streisand is original; and she often, if not always, has been fearless in art and politics.
The Cultural Politics Discussion Group: Gestures Toward an American Utopia (featuring Experiments in Criticism)
This article commemorates the Cultural Politics Discussion Group (1989-1993) and offers comment on literature and literary criticism, Pirandello, John Stuart Mill, and also articulates questions about feminism and Jewish modernity.
A review of Salt and Dreaming Wide Awake by Lizz Wright
“My eyes burn, I have seen the glory of a brighter sun,” Wright sings in “Dreaming Wide Awake,” with its limpid beginning. Lizz Wright sings, “Who are you, stranger, to come here, and answer all my prayers?” and one might ask the same thing of her: and I imagine she may spend her entire career answering the question. It is something to look forward to.