The Mumpsimus

A few years ago, I declared a movie about Emily Dickinson, A Quiet Passion , to be "one of the worst movies I've ever seen". It remains so. Madeleine Olnek's Wild Nights with Emily  is everything A Quiet Passion  is not: lively, irreverent, joyfully artificial, poetic without being "Poetic", exuberantly cinematic, intentionally funny, and, in the end, quite moving. And while it is occasionally anachronistic, frequently campy, definitely uninterested in nuanced (or balanced) (or even fair) portraits of historical figures, and sometimes just flat-out bonkers, it's also a bit more accurate to Dickinson's actual life — and vastly more accurate to her legacy — than A Quiet Passion  was. But Wild Nights with Emily  is more than a biopic. It's a movie about literary history, about how stories of writers (and artists of all sorts) get told and received. It says that even with truths in plain sight, most people prefer legends, because legends are ...

J.M. Coetzee by Bert Nienhuis Sunday, February 9 is J.M. Coetzee's 80th birthday. I have written about Coetzee frequently — you'll find plenty here at this site (including one of the oldest posts: 2003's "Genre, Imagination, and J.M. Coetzee" , written by a callow youth), as well as in my new book Modernist Crisis and the Pedagogy of Form: Woolf, Delany, and Coetzee at the Limits of Fiction . There are already various tributes being published; one I particularly enjoyed was Angelo Frick's for the Mail & Guardian , as Frick was once Coetzee's student, and writes well about Coetzee as a teacher and the value of studying literature. At this moment, trapped in New Hampshire a few days before the Democratic primary , feeling deluged by desultory politics, I keep thinking back to some passages in Coetzee's Summertime , a book about a character named John Coetzee, a writer with a life story somewhat like his own, a writer who is dead and whose f...