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Book Review | Finding rhythm, and poetry, in workers' labors
In the last half-century, American poetry folded in on itself and turned into a reflexive, specialist's art. A poem was not an object of beauty, the thinking went, but rather a crossword puzzle with no clues; it could mean anything. As a result of these developments, poets now attend school to learn how to write, graduate to teach writing, and then construct most of their work for other poets. The reader who wants to be shown something beautiful is simply out of the loop.
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Reviewed by John Freeman,
10/07/2004 03:01 AM EDT)
History class clowns
The gang at Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" have whipped up a textbook that you won't see in school.
Not content with their nightly skewering of current events on Comedy Central, Jon Stewart and the other writers of The Daily Show have taken on a bigger target in America (The Book): lampooning all of U.S. history.
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By David Hiltbrand,
Inquirer Staff Writer,
10/05/2004 03:01 AM EDT)
Movies can do better by Italians, scholar says
Shark Tale, the slick yet fishy animated feature cartoon from DreamWorks that set an October record for film debuts this past weekend with $49.1 million in ticket sales, tells the comic story of a young Mafia shark and sissy, Lenny - a vegetarian - who keeps failing to live up to the family expectations of his powerful father, Don Lino.
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By Carlin Romano,
Inquirer Book Critic,
10/05/2004 03:01 AM EDT)
Book Review | Girl hungers for money to get out of the projects and be safe
On the first Monday of the month, The Inquirer publishes a review written by one of the youths participating in the Teen Book Critics Program, part of the Free Library of Philadelphia's Field Family Teen Author Series program.
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10/04/2004 03:01 AM EDT)
A Turkish bridge between Muslim East, secular West
On Aug. 30, 1922, the Turkish army, led by Kemal Ataturk, fought its final battle for independence, paving the way for the formation of the secular Muslim Republic of Turkey. If you visit Turkey on what is now called Victory Day, you will see banners with patriotic slogans, one of which reads, "We are still on guard." That phrase could be the subtitle of Snow, the seventh novel by Orhan Pamuk.
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10/03/2004 03:01 AM EDT)
Borges, real life, and how he used it
There's something ironic about a biography of Jorge Luis Borges. In his stories, poems and essays, the late Argentinian achieved world renown, after all, for merging history and fiction, dreams and reality, as well as for undermining our very concept of personal identity. It was Borges who became virtually synonymous with the image of the labyrinth, with endlessly repeating mirrors and with man's vertiginous attempts to confront infinity itself. He wrote stories such as "The Theologians," in which...
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10/03/2004 03:01 AM EDT)
Editor The green-eyed monster, slinking through time
Earlier this year, New Directions published All the Poems of Muriel Spark. In her foreword to that collection of poems written over a period of more than half a century, Spark - best known for her fiction - noted that "my outlook on life and my perceptions of events are those of a poet." The economy of means, precision of language and formal perfection on display in The Finishing School, Dame Muriel's 22d novel, amply demonstrate her point.
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By Frank Wilson,
Inquirer Books Editor,
10/03/2004 03:01 AM EDT)
Carlin Romano |
Carlin Romano's "On Books" column does not appear today.
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By Carlin Romano,
Inquirer Book Critic,
10/03/2004 03:01 AM EDT)
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