Light On Dark Water

Books

  • 52 Authors: Week 28 – W.S. Merwin

    Note: in order to keep the series going through what I hope is only a dry spell, I've resorted to republishing the following piece, which was the Sunday Night Journal for November 7, 2011. I had intended to re-work it for this post, but found that there's really nothing much I want to change. The…

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  • 52 Authors – Week 28?

    Anybody have something anywhere close to ready? Unless I've forgotten someone's email, there are no specific commitments for any date between now and September 20.

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  • 52 Authors: Week 27 – Ross Macdonald

    I wonder whether Ross Macdonald is as highly regarded as he once was. Perhaps serious students and fans of the mystery genre still rank him with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but it wouldn't surprise me if his reputation has suffered. Why? A suspicion that he might be considered old-fashioned, conventional, and bourgeois. The stout…

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  • 52 Authors: Week 26 – E.B. White

    E.B. White was a great comic novelist. In working on this piece I read his trilogy of fantasy animals twice, and came away with the conviction that these are comic masterpieces. They are of course fantasy novels, in which animals talk and write. The fantasy world of these novels belongs within the genre of comedy.…

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  • 52 Authors: Week 25 – Josef Skvorecky

    Josef Škvorecký is perhaps not a famous author (or perhaps he is and I've just missed it). In any case, he died in 2012 and his works are not now easy to find in English in Europe. He was a Czech dissident who went into exile in 1968, after the Prague Spring, and got a…

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  • Liberalism Vs. Literature

    It's frequently remarked by conservatives that present-day liberalism tends to politicize every aspect of life. Or should I say "aims" instead of "tends"? I'm not sure to what extent this movement is intentional, but it's certainly evident. Feminism has surely played a big role in it, starting with "The personal is political" and all that.…

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  • 52 Authors: Week 24 – Anne Pellowski

    I love reading children’s books. I loved them when I was eight and could walk to the library whenever I wanted, and I loved them even more, I think, when I read them to my children, or before giving them to my children. Sometimes I still read them, even though all my children are grown…

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  • Something for Brontë Fans

    I read this book some months ago and have been meaning to mention it. A year or so ago (or was it two?) I read Wuthering Heights for the first time since college. I wrote about it briefly here–yes, it was only last year. Some time after that I ran across this book while browsing in…

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  • 52 Authors: Week 23 – Gillian Allnutt

    Gillian Allnutt is a contemporary English poet whose work I have admired for the better part of fifteen years. If someone asked me — which, to date, nobody has — to describe her poetry, the words that might come to mind are not mine, but Hopkins’: “counter, original, spare, strange.” Frankly, I’m a sucker for…

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  • 52 Authors: Week 22 – Laura Ingalls Wilder

    I received two beautiful hardback copies of Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie for Christmas, 1967. I would have been just short of my eighth birthday. I loved these books, with their beautiful illustrations. Over the next three years, I read the rest of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series: seven…

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