W.D. Clarke’s Reviews > American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring > Status Update

...the real scandal of the book should not have been its title, or its quaking along the fault lines of sexuality and race, but rather its linguistic ineptitude of the first order, which is exactly what Lawrence means by “false”: every novel is true or false in its language before it’s true or false in anything else.

(On DH Lawrence on Karl van Vechten's 1925 unnamable novel)

I need to get back to this and finish it, but here is Giraldi today in the LARB interviewing his idol Harold Bloom:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/p...

Excellent essay on Melville, and a superb one on Poe.

I find Giraldi much more satisfying when he writes about authors rather than critics. His one on the heroic Harper Lee of Mockingbird vs the victim of Go Tell A Watchman, was fantastic...
Also: librarians, this book has 462 not 336 pp!

He is in love with Bloom.
(Not Leopold: Harold)

Ever read a book that irritated/filled you with admiration in equal measure? E.g. if, after decrying the level of discourse on social media, you sincerely wish to bestow the epithet "bloviator" upon another (viz.Terry Eagleton), be so kind as to explain yourself, or my seconds needs must call upon your seconds as the morn, in russet mantle clad, shall surely walk o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill, sirrah.

The first criterion by which to judge any book is by the sentences