09
March
2012

Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it is the MFA programs

First, Tim Parks’s translation of Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is unspeakably brilliant and remains for me, nearly twenty years after its publication, as close to a religious experience as I’ve ever had. Second, Mr. Parks’s latest piece in The New York Review of Books, “The Writer’s Job,” is dead-on right, except […]

03
March
2012

I’m shocked! Shocked! Serious novels lack cultural relevance!

Nevertheless, this Weekly Standard piece by Roger Kimball is worth reading.  In “The Great American Novel: Will there ever be another?” Kimball argues that the novel has lost its former cultural relevance in part because the “character of culture” has changed. I happen to agree.  I don’t happen to care. The novel went the way […]