It has been months since I wrote a Literary Links post, and yet I love this kind of post at other blogs: I am always looking for recommendations of internet articles. If you’re at the beach – I’m not – and getting blasted by the sunshine and heat, you might retire to the shade and check out one or more of these articles about books and writers.
1. Those of us who like domestic humor – and who doesn’t? – will relish the following clever article about Jean Kerr, the brilliant essayist and playwright who entertained us with Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and The Snake Has All the Lines. You can read “Days of Wine and Daisies” at The Washington Examiner (April 14, 2003). And you won’t regret it, whether you are male or female, because Kerr is always relevant.
Here is a short excerpt.
“Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” is a collection of witty dispatches from the frontlines of motherhood. She had plenty of material.. Kerr has been compared, inevitably, to that other published suburban housewife, Erma Bombeck, though, in truth, the only book in the genre that can rank with “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” is Shirley Jackson’s “Life Among the Savages,” a surprisingly charming account of motherhood from the author better known for the grim story “The Lottery” and the Jamesian horror novel “The Haunting of Hill House.” While Bombeck did tread some of the same ground, she didn’t write about, say, how she taught her boys not to loathe poetry. Worried that the only Milton their children would know was the chocolate maker, the Kerrs instituted a family “Culture Hour” in which the children would recite poems they’d memorized during the week, followed by some highbrow music on the hi-fi.
2. Thoreau is my favorite Transcendentalist philosopher, and I had no idea Walden was controversial nowadays. Sometime it is good NOT to keep up, especially in 2021. But Caleb Smith investigates all sides of what for me is a non-question in his thoughtful essay, “Thoreau in Good Faith”, at Public Books.
“One of the books that I love is Henry David Thoreau’s Walden,” Alda Balthrop-Lewis writes at the beginning of her new book, Thoreau’s Religion. Before she starts analyzing Walden, she composes a little list of its charms. Some of the features she names are aesthetic: “I like it because it is funny, and beautiful, and weird.” Some of them are ethical: “I like that it doesn’t seem to hide its weird messy bits, its contradictions and vices.”
Balthrop-Lewis, a research fellow in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University, is letting us know that she will be taking the part of the author she studies, not taking him apart. Rather than seeking out Thoreau’s hypocrisies or flaws, she will treat him with generous affection. In other words, she will read Walden in good faith.
3 . Graham Greene fans will enjoy this fascinating review at Commonweal of a new biography of Greene, The Unquiet Englishman. Here is an excerpt:
…The Unquiet Englishman, Richard Greene’s sparkling new biography of Graham Greene, would have a lot of interest even if the latter were not an important writer who, twenty years after his death, still has a large audience. Graham Greene traveled widely, through Europe, Mexico, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Vietnam, and the United States, and he wrote about what he saw in all those places. He worked for the British secret service during World War II, and spent a lot of time with Kim Philby, who would later turn out to be a double agent for the Soviet Union. Greene became a Catholic in 1927 in order to marry Vivien Dayrell-Browning, but almost from the start, he had trouble with the practical demands of Catholicism—and in particular, trouble with marital fidelity. Soon after his marriage, he began a long series of affairs, but Vivien refused to grant him a divorce, and he continued to support her.
What have you been reading on the net? Any good literary links?
Happy Weekend!