The Last Stoic  is now slated for publication in the spring of 2011.

A short pastiche – bringing together the top stories of 2010. 

The Year In Review

The second novel by my friend and next-door neighbour, Leanne Lieberman!

by Stuart Ross. 

A collection of deeply weird, surreal, comic-tragic short stories. 

My favourite:  The Suntan.  A very moving and human exchange between two unlikely characters.

by U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky.  A great primer on the rhythms and structures of traditional, blank, and free verse.

There is a striking passage in George Orwell’s essay on Charles Dickens.  He is writing about David Copperfield.  It’s truly amazing how much attitudes have changed toward child rearing in the last 150 years.  Orwell writes,

In Dicken’s youth children were still being “solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen,” and it was not so long since boys of thirteen had been hanged for petty theft.  The doctrine of “breaking the child’s spirit” was in full vigour, and The Fairchild Family was a standard book for children till late into the century.  This evil book is now issued in pretty-pretty expurgated editions, but it is well worth reading in the original version.  It gives one some idea of the lengths to which child-discipline was sometimes carried.

Mr. Fairchild, for instance, when he catches his children quarreling, first thrashes them, reciting Doctor Watt’s “Let dogs delight to bark and bite” between blows of the cane, and then takes them to spend the afternoon beneath a gibbet where the rotting corpse of a murderer is hanging. 

Orwell’s own experience at Crossgates, a public boarding school, was similar, sadly, to what Dickens describes.  He was obviously greatly affected by it.

I’m looking for a copy of The Fairchild Family to read now ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_the_Fairchild_Family), (not for advice!).

By Henry Miller.

A fascinating essay called Inside The Whale by Orwell put me on to this novel.  Orwell argues that the arrival of Tropic of Cancer in 1935 signalled a new ethic in literature, a call to “give yourself over to the world-process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you control it; simply accept it, endure it, record it.”  He puts the book in context as it comes out between the great wars, after the Nature poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge) and the modernists (Joyce, Eliot).  He says, 

…he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.

Intriguing.  Orwell also mentions A.E. Housman and describes him as a “country” poet, “his poems are full of the charm of buried villages, the nostalgia of place-names, Clunton and Clunbury, Knighton, Ludlow…”  I had to check that out too, and enjoyed reading Housman’s Shropshire Lad.  I can see why it is derided as simplistic, manly, and patriotic, but it’s a fun read.

Orwell says,

At bottom it is always a writer’s tendency, his “purpose,” his “message,”, that makes him liked or disliked.  The proof of this is the extreme difficulty of seeing any literary merit in a book that seriously damages your deepest beliefs.  And no book is ever truly neutral.

the Collected Poetry.