(Guy Davenport drawing, from his book Tatlin!)
Note: This essay is slightly revised from the original version which ran in The Comics Journal #278 (October 2006).
Guy Davenport, cartoonist. Perhaps this is too confident a statement and needs a more tentative punctuation. “Guy Davenport: cartoonist?” After all, Davenport wasn’t mainly known as a cartoonist, and the world of comics has [...]
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Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Long dead and safely buried, Nathaniel Hawthorne is now securely ensconced as a benign classic. The Scarlet Letter and Hawthorne’s short stories are often taught to high school students. But in his own lifetime and for years after his demise, Hawthorne was a divisive figure in American letters, widely reviled for his satire on the [...]
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Joseph McCarthy.
On his blog, David Frum enthuses over Bruce Bartlett’s just released book Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past:
The enjoyable theme is Bartlett’s gleeful partisan slagging of the horrible racial history of the Democratic party from ancient times to modern. Specialists in American history may know much of this story, but probably the typical reader does [...]
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Sarah Boxer’s new book.
Last fall while visiting Boston, I met up with my friend Sarah Boxer, an excellent cultural journalist and cartoonist. Over an appropriately American lunch of hamburgers and coke we chatted a bit about her upcoming book Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web, an anthology of strong blog writing. The problem with such [...]
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The great pianist Oscar Peterson.
According the Graeme Hamilton, writing in the National Post, the word “Canadian” is now used as a coded ethnic slur in the American south to refer to blacks:
The bigger mystery is how “Canadian” came to be code for black. An online directory of racial slurs defines Canadian as a “masked replacement” for black.
Last August, a blogger in [...]
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Those who care about criticism, admittedly a rarefied concern, find it useful sometimes to review the reviewers. For movies, it’s an easy enough game: just watch a flick and then go to Rotten Tomatoes and find out what the peanut gallery is up to. If you do this a few times, you’ll discover that there’s a [...]
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Marshall McLuhan was a bizarre figure: a conservative Catholic who became the hero of the 1960s counterculture and a brilliant analyst of print culture who had trouble writing clear prose. In the Literary Review of Canada, Bob Rodgers writes an essay worth looking up which splendidly captures McLuhan and his times:
McLuhan, a stringy but handsome man at six [...]
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Marc Chagall’s Ruth Gleaning.
Jesus thought a great deal about garbage. He had been raised in a tradition that made a fundamental distinction between purity and impurity, kosher and treif, the sacred and the profane. These seem like very strict and absolute binary divisions but Hebrew scripture also contained an ambiguity. The sacred texts abound in [...]
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A headline from today’s Washington Post:
The Other Clinton Is an Absent Presence
That headline was about 40 years in the making. Derrida developed his ideas about absence/presence in the mid-1960s. It takes about 5-10 years for a major work of continental philosophy to get translated into English. Another 10 years for North American professors and graduate [...]
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Sans Everything is a blog that supports animal rights. So it seems amiss for me to keep beating the same poor broken-down horse, whether it’s dead or alive. Still, there is one last comment to make about Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. [...]
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