The 8th Annual Poetry Reading at “First Things”
Also: The glories of the American rodeo, Camus on the road, a life of Anthony Hecht, on translating Nonnus, and more.
If you have nothing on your calendar this upcoming Sunday and live in or close to New York City, why not come listen to Catharine Savage Brosman read her work at First Things? Brosman was the Gore Chair of French Studies at Tulane for many years and is the author of fifteen collections of poetry and many works of nonfiction. Her latest collection is Aerosols and Other Poems. She is a wonderful reader of her work. In fact, even if you have something on your calendar, why not clear it and join us. I’ll be there, of course, and would love to meet any Prufrock readers. Space is limited. Reserve your spot now.
In other news, Clare Coffey writes about the glories of the American rodeo in The Bulwark: “As you walk up through the fields to where the floodlights gleam, you pass an old man who came on horseback, a big silver buckle on his belt and a feather in his hat and a (surely deservedly) self-satisfied grin on his face. You pass wranglers and coordinators of various kinds leading and lugging horses and cattle from where they should not be to where they should be. As you approach the chutes, the smell of animal sweat and straw and good clean cattle dung intensifies and dominates the normal carnival smells. Something clangs; something is moving in the dimness. I always pause for a minute. It seems impossible that a bull should be in that narrow space, that all his rippling, archaic mass should be so casually separated from the unconcerned human world of asphalt paving and plastic port-a-potties by a flimsy metal gate. A bull in a field is one thing. A bull under the bleachers is another.”
Jack Trotter reviews a new book on the historian C. Vann Woodward: “In this extensive study of the life and work of Comer Vann Woodward, University of Georgia professor James Cobb admirably assesses the loyalties of one of the most influential historians of the 20th century, whose best-known books explored the rise of the New South and the emergence of the Jim Crow regime. Woodward’s historiography, while to some extent superceded by subsequent research and flawed by a ‘presentism’ that sometimes blinded him to realities that did not serve his own liberal political aims, remains a valuable contribution to our understanding of both Southern and American history in the post-Reconstruction era.”
Adam Shatz reviews Albert Camus’s travel notebooks: “His admirers will look in vain for the Resistance hero and romantic rebel in a trenchcoat, or the philosopher of absurdity and opponent of totalitarianism, or the anguished pied noir, torn between his anti-colonial convictions and his fierce attachment to France. Aside from the occasional aphorism in progress (‘the idea of messianism is at the root of all fanaticism’), there’s little trace of the moralist who, as Sartre remarked, always carried ‘a portable pedestal’ with him. Instead, we find a grouchy author on tour, bedevilled by ‘fevers’ (as he referred to his condition), oppressed by the demands of fans and sycophants, and faced with a New World which seems to him somehow menacing. The absence of philosophical preening is a relief.”
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