Everything

There’s been a bit of back and forth about questions of translatability ( and ), and I thought it was worth some observations. I have mentioned this before on the blog, but for those who do not know, I teach upper level ESL to students who plan on entering graduate school in North America. It’s [...]

Last time, we saw that in his critical introduction to , Gene Tanta wants us to approach his poetry both as immigrant poetry (which means a couple of things) and for its aesthetic value. I postulated that he accomplishes a dialectic between “local” and “universal” through strategies that extend and enrich Deep Image and surrealist [...]

A week ago I had the great pleasure of meeting Dr. Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, at the Aspen Institute’s Cultural Diplomacy Forum at the Philips Collection. She was participating in a panel discussion with Michael Dirda about her work at Johns Hopkins and the role the arts can play in shaping [...]

Nixon went down to the beach and sat in the sand and waited. The waves came in, the waves went out, and he sat there in his suit and waited. There comes a point, in every election, where there seems like there’s nothing anyone can do. Whatever is going to happen will happen. It has [...]

This entry is part of a series, Joe Weil on Metaphor» In my next several posts, I am going to talk about metaphors and the invisible neutrino of “and” that lies beneath them. I will make the following contentions: 1. Metaphors are as much about disassociation as association 2. Metaphors generate subtexts. 3. Consciousness and [...]

Almost every poem in Matthew Zapruder’s third book, Come On All You Ghosts (a statement that is both joke and plea) starts with the word today or implies it with a declaration involving an observation almost generic in sound and meaning: “Today a ladybug flew through the window. I was reading” “Today in El Paso [...]

Ingmar Bergman called Tarkovsky, “the greatest.” It’s hard to argue with Bergman. While Tarkovsky is not a well-enough known director, this is probably just as well because virtually anything popular becomes bastardized. Tarkovsky will probably never be “popular” simply because of the interminable length and oppressive mood of his films. Tarkovsky created most of his [...]