An impressionable youth of the 1990s loved Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing. It looked and read differently than most of the other books that he owned. The irony of buying an indie punk book in his suburban Barnes & Noble didn’t escape him, but he still enjoyed the book just the same. Fast forward fifteen years of world travel, NPO work, and growing up. A chance reintroduction at a Half-Price Books reunited said youth and said book, and a glorious reunion was had by […]
Unlucky Jason (a more painful Lucky Jim, in letters)
As an academic, I do enjoy poking fun at myself and my profession every once in awhile. Like any other profession, there is plenty about academia that is ridiculous/absurd/unfair/hilarious. I don’t particularly enjoy Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (and I suspect that has as much to do with the sort of white-boyisms that populate the novel, and that Jim is kind of a twit), and I haven’t yet read any of David Lodge’s work (I hear The British Museum Is Falling Down is excellent, however). So […]
For younger and older and not necessarily poets
“The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space” Franz Xaver Kappus was a young man dreaming of becoming a poet in the early 1903. A great admirer of the already accomplished poet R.M. Rilke, he wrote a letter asking for advice on how to become a poet. This book is 10 letters out of 6 years of correspondence. We read only Rilke’s answers to Mr. Kappus, but the answers are so universal and thorough that we do not need the […]