Author Archives: Ian

From Blackbeard to Jeffrey Dahmer

Recently, a relative gave me his copy of a large book called “The Encyclopedia of American Crime,” put together by the crime reporter Carl Sifakis and subtitled “From Blackbeard to Jeffrey Dahmer.” While Blackbeard gets a complete entry and a … Continue reading

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Aragorn does Eliot

From a New York Times editorial on T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” as app: Another touch guides you to voices reading the whole poem aloud, including Eliot the poet and Viggo Mortensen, the “Lord of the Rings” star. There is … Continue reading

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Warriors, come out and play-ay

Like Xenophon’s “Anabasis,” on which it is based, the 1979 now-cult classic “The Warriors” stays with us because of how bad it is. I watched it the other night for the first time since college, after finding it on the … Continue reading

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Animals in poetry, life, death, and Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens’ first poem, chronologically speaking—”Earthy Anecdote”—has always struck me as doing precisely what I gather Helen Vendler ascribes to “The Hermitage at the Center.” “And yet this end and this beginning are one,” Stevens writes in the late poem. … Continue reading

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Journalist murders blog with post on ‘The Journalist and the Murderer’

Inaugural posts are for the blogger what first impressions are for the social climber. There’s the anxiety of the need to be memorable, the uncertainty of how best to present oneself, the knowledge that the spontaneity of the medium, like … Continue reading

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