The Mumpsimus

Let me begin with disclaimer: This is not a review of Liz Ahl's first book-length collection of poems, Beating the Bounds . Liz is a longtime friend who sometimes writes about the place where I live and people I know, so anything I say about this book's qualities ought to be suspect. Further, I'm not very good at writing about poetry. I read a lot of poetry — well, "a lot" in comparison to most Americans, certainly, and probably in comparison to most writers who are not themselves poets — but have no facility for writing about poetry with much more insight than, "I like this line," or "Doesn't that sound nice?" What this post is, then, is not a review but a notice, plus quotations and anecdotes. Notice: Liz Ahl has published her first book-length collection of poems, Beating the Bounds . No book better captures what it looks like, smells like, sounds like, feels like to live in rural central New Hampshire than this book. That may s

Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water  was the opening film of the mini-festival Telluride at Dartmouth , and so I got to see it a few months before it will be released generally. I love del Toro's work — even when it falls flat for me ( Crimson Peak ), it's nonetheless clearly the work of someone with his own vision and style. And when I am on the same wavelength as the film ( The Devil's Backbone , Pan's Labyrinth , Pacific Rim ), the experience is overwhelmingly beautiful and moving. Indeed, that for me is the hallmark of del Toro at his best: real, unbridled emotion coupled with a visual imagination that is lushly inventive, and a sense for color the equal of any other director today. Del Toro is also a master melodramatist, a common form not frequently mastered. In that sense, he's our Douglas Sirk , but without Sirk's irony. (Perhaps we could say that del Toro replaces Sirk's irony with fantasy: melding a classical sense of melodrama with

That is the tune but there are no words.  The words are only speculation  (From the Latin speculum , mirror):  They seek and cannot find the meaning of the music.  We see only postures of the dream,  Riders of the motion that swings the face  Into view under evening skies, with no  False disarray as proof of authenticity.  But it is life englobed.  One would like to stick one's hand  Out of the globe, but its dimension,  What carries it, will not allow it. —John Ashbery 1. John Ashbery died on the day that Twin Peaks: The Returned  aired its final episode, a fact that will likely go unremarked in future Ashbery biographies and tomes of Twin Peaks  exegesis, but I can't help coming back to it, not only because Ashbery and David Lynch are two of the most prominent surrealists in American culture (though of course no one term can sum up either, and I use it here as much as a gesture or a placeholder as I do anything else), but also because their p

Marie NDiaye's 2007 novel Mon coeur à l'étroit  has now been translated by Jordan Stamp and published by Two Lines Press as My Heart Hemmed In . It is a strange, unsettling book, a tale told by a woman named Nadia whose husband receives a ghastly wound that he refuses to have treated, a woman who is being suddenly shunned not only by everyone she knows but apparently by everyone in the city of Bordeaux except for a famous writer she's never heard of, who appoints himself her husband's caretaker. She has an ex-husband who lives in destitution in their own apartment. She is estranged from her son, who once had a male lover (now a police inspector) whom Nadia might have been more in love with than her own child, and who then married a woman and had a daughter, Souhar, whose name Nadia detests. The novel's first paragraph is in many ways its guiding idea: Now and then, at first, I think I catch people scowling in my direction. They can't really mean me, can t