What have I been reading, aside from work stuff? Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding (genuinely charming - and no, you don't have to care about baseball); Jon-Jon Goulian's The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt (highly engaging); Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone (loved it, can't wait for the next installment!).
At the LRB, Colin Burrow offers a fascinating account of Kristine Haugen's Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment, a book I need to get hold of as soon as I can!
Also: Things Magazine takes up the BLDG BLOG invitation to consider the spatial history of trapdoors.
Blogging is likely to be light this week, as I'll be in Ottawa from Tuesday to Sunday.
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The Haugen book sounds interesting though Burrow (as usual) doesn't say much directly about it. The fact that Bentley's method was popular, e.g., with dons like Housman (who also "kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer") is entirely unmysterious, given the nature of the Cambridge milieu. I think Burrow is also glib in dismissing the importance of the Housman-like _idea_ that textual puzzles were where the action was at to critics like Empson (B exemplifying E's class, in intro to 7 types (iirc) of critics that, not content to relieve themselves upon the flower of beauty, afterwards scratch it up) -- the key thing being to _risk_ something, like Bentley, even being a dunce, rather than to escape with "bland refusals."
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