I had a wonderful discussion with my “Literary Interpretation” students last week, about the detritus that is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. My friend Paul Saint-Amour has written about the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses as a kind of test case for fair use, testing the boundaries of copyright; many [...]
Back to the primal scene: the roads from Champaign, Illinois, to St. Louis, Missouri. Roads paved . . . with poetry. I don’t just mean the poetry at the end of the road, a dollop of T. S. Eliot at the end of the rainbow of St. Louis’s Gateway Arch: I’m talking about that quintessential [...]
As I’ve been saying, I made my way last weekend, for the third time now, to the annual T. S. Eliot conference in St. Louis. Attendance is always something of a tough call for me: when I was in Carbondale for nine years, it was just down the road a stretch, making attendance fairly convenient [...]
Yesterday night I drove from Champaign, Illinois, where we’re visiting my daughter & son & son-in-law, down to St. Louis, for the T. S. Eliot conference. St. Lunatics! These Eliot folks—they’re crazy! The first day of the conference has been great, and I hope to write a little about it for Monday. But today and [...]
My apologies again, faithful readers: not the 24 hours I’d promised I’d keep you waiting, but quite a few more. My “technological problems” boil down really to a new installation of Windows 7 on my College laptop—and its seeming unwillingness, now, to do most anything I ask of it when I’m working at home. I [...]
OK, so this has been building up for a while; and rather than lurking around all snippy and defensive in the Comments section, really I need to mount a more thoughtful, and measured, response to this whole topic. And the topic, of course, is the charge that I “over-analyze” things. I’d like to begin by [...]
[Dear fcrp readers: Today, and for the next four days (through Wednesday), I’ll be attempting to answer the musical questions, "Kevin, Why do you care about Radiohead? And why should I?" These aren’t purely rhetorical questions; indeed, I have to say, they aren’t even ones I would have thought required an answer, since the answer [...]
A few weeks ago, a reader posted a comment asking, in essence: How do I do it? A burning question for many fcrp fans, I know. A question that surely calls to mind Elvis Costello’s “My Science Fiction Twin”: His almost universal excellence Is starting to disturb me They asked how in the world he [...]