A Bit of This and That

I'll be returning to Powell's poem, per request from Stephen, once I get a bit of time to sit and think about it again, with reference material around me. If you haven't yet, check out his lucid comments on the poem.

* At The Weekly Standard, an article by Michael Dirda on Anglo-Catholic author Graham Greene, 'After the death of Henry James, according to Greene, "the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act." Consequently, Greene's own work--especially the major books of what one might call his middle period: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair — sought to reinvest contemporary fiction with moral seriousness, to depict solid and real people trapped in life-or-death ethical dilemmas and racked by guilt and despair.' I've really got to read up on him. But since I'm ignorant: any thoughts on this? True that we've become more interested in him than in his life? My first expose to Greene was in a Paris Review interview, which was one of the stranger pieces in their first collected edition — as I recall, it dealt more with his religious inclination than with his work, but that may be an inaccurate recollection.

* The TLS has a piece in commemoration of Eudora Welty's centenary, and especially her role and the influence of the Works Projects / Progress Administration. 'Born one hundred years ago this month in Jackson, Mississippi, and raised in that city, she left her native state for the University of Wisconsin before attending the Columbia University School of Business, New York. She dreaded becoming a teacher like her mother and had decided on a business career, specifically in advertising. However, having seen New York City in the grip of the Depression – its queues and groups of the jobless are viewed through Mississippi eyes in another early story, “Flowers for Marjorie” – she understood the impracticability of her plan, and returned south.'

* This week's Slate poem-of-the-week is 'Eurydice: 1887', by Avery Slater.

* Really Arlen Specter? Really? I mean, I guess if you favor the stimulus bill, then you favor government intervention on behalf of the economy (and you also favor facts, which are nice), then you're a Democrat by default because it is the only meaningful divide (all the morality stuff is smoke and mirrors). But, really?