Anecdotal Evidence

“If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.”

Two poets seldom linked came together in the New York Times on September 8, 1912.

Over the weekend I read a book review full of enthusiastic approval that was so poorly written, anything the critic had to say was immediately nullified by his own incompetence.

It’s a commonplace to say you can read a serious reader’s autobiography on his bookshelves.

The most casually intelligent person I have ever known was D.G.

“My first novel, Bright Center of Heaven, is a compendium of all the writers I loved and admired.

The first stanza of C.H.

Clive James in his essay on Louis Armstrong in Cultural Amnesia (2007): “[F]or the way I thought prose should move I learned a lot from jazz.

The late Victor Brombert writes in The Pensive Citadel (University of Chicago Press, 2023): “[T]here is a rarer, quite precious experience that might be called ‘pre-reading,’ when certain dispositions in our character, coupled with circumstances, make us…

Kafka somewhere says that impatience is a form of laziness.

I’m reading another book by C.E.

For the first time, my youngest son, working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru, recommended a book for me to read.

In 1995, R.L.

I remember one afternoon as a boy while in the neighbor’s back yard falling in love with the word of.

“He is almost as important to me as Shakespeare, and I think of him almost as the second most important writer in English, absurd as that might sound.”

“H-hour, 0800.

While looking for nothing I found a genuine curiosity: an interview with Tom Wolfe focused on poetry.

In 1848, James Russll Lowell published the book-length poem A Fable for Critics.

If pushed to choose my favorite literary form, I would reluctantly reject novels and aphorisms and settle on the essay which, in the right hands, can boast the generosity of the former and the pithy tartness of the latter.

I’m skeptical of prophecy, weighing even the scriptural sort against the evidence and the suitability of the prophet.

“The futurists claim that the book as we know it will disappear, like that magician’s egg, and that it will be replaced by ‘electronic data retrieval’ through our home computers.

“Until recently, I considered David Copperfield to be the best English-language novel I’d read.

My review of Vasily Grossman’s From the Front Line: Stalingrad-Treblinka-Berlin (New York Review Books, 2026) is published in the Fall issue of Portico.

In his Spectator essay for January 15, 1712, Joseph Addison tells us he spent the day with friends, “an Assembly of Virtuosos,” one of whom describes “many curious Observations” regarding human anatomy.

In 1939, Louise Bogan reviewed for The New Yorker new poetry collections by Archibald MacLeish and Muriel Rukeyser.

It was probably the first wildflower I learned to identify.

“Style means the necessary word.

“The words you see are all there is worth seeing.”

“This day proving wet, we should have passed our time very uncomfortably, had we not found in the house two chests of books, which we eagerly ransacked.”

Readers often ask interesting questions.

On August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed to the secret non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The stuff starts as white powder at the bottom of a one-gallon plastic jug.

Fifty-one years ago I was working as a clerk in Kay’s Books in downtown Cleveland, perhaps the best job I ever had though my six-day-a-week paycheck never topped the double digits.

Because of something I wrote, an old friend tells me he is reading at last, in his seventies, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton’s prose compendium of marvels.

Dr.

Weeds I can’t name crowd the front garden, adding to the lushness of our greenery.

Here’s a book I haven’t read in some sixty years: Antony van Leeuwenhoek and His ‘Little Animals’ by Clifford Dobell, published in 1932 by Harcourt, Brace and Co.

Like the rest of us, poets often favor certain times of the year.

I think we both sensed it might be our final conversation.

In 1950, the poet J.V.

“But to politicks and literature there must be an end.”

The poet W.S.

A reader expresses surprise at my admission that I once read William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

When we think of ferocious predators among animals we likely think of sharks and grizzly bears, big creatures with teeth.