“Recent war novels have accustomed us all to ugly words and images, but from the mouths of the very young and protected they sound particularly offensive…the ear refuses to believe.”
The New York Herald Tribune Book Review
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged literary oddities, readings/research
“Every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”
Bernard Baruch Baruch: My Own Story (1996)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“Your manuscript is both good and original; the the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
“Why has our author selected such a theme? …the nauseous amour of a Puritan pastor, with a frail creature of his charge, whose mind is represented as far more debauched than her body? Is it in short, because a running undertide of filth has become as requisite to a romance, as death in the fifth act of a tragedy? Is the French era actually begun in our literature?”
Arthur Cleveland Coxe, Church Review
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
(It’s worth mentioning that I believe Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep is one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. After a sixty-year long episode of writer’s block–when he published mostly articles about the exotic fowl business in which he was engaged in Maine–Henry Roth returned to publish, in the 1990s, just before his death, the superb, dark Mercy of a Rude Stream quartet, one of the great events of my reading life.)
“The book lays all possible stress on the nastiness of the human animal. It is the fashion, and we must make the best of the spectacle of a fine book deliberately and as it were doggedly smeared with verbal filthiness.”
The New York Times Book Review
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
(The post just below this one is a Weekly Text on Langston Hughes’ poem “I, too, sing America,” which is Mr. Hughes’ response to Walt Whitman’s poem “I Hear America Singing.” This seemed as a good as place as any to post these squibs about Mr. Whitman’s work from these, uh, unperceptive reviewers.)
“No, no, this kind of thing won’t do…. The good folks down below (I mean posterity) will have none of it.”
James Russell Lowell, quoted in The Complete Works, Vol. 14, 1904
“Whitman is as unacquainted with poetry as a hog is with mathematics.”
The London Critic
“Of course, to call it poetry, in any sense, would be mere abuse of language.”
William Allingham, letter to W.M. Rossetti, 1857
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
[The New Statesman and Nation was a British publication that resulted in a merger in 1931 between the New Statesman and The Nation and Athenaeum, and is now apparently known simply as New Statesman. In any case, it’s hard to imagine that any magazine in Britain could seriously say that the country, at the time of the publication of Richard Wright’s Native Son–1940–was “away from that particular racial problem.”]
“The astounding thing is that the publisher is able to send out with the book a typescript about the weight of a Tor Bay Sole entirely made up of favorable reviews from the American Press. Over here and away from that particular racial problem the book seems unimpressive and silly, not even as much fun as a thriller.”
New Statesman and Nation
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Always to see the general in the particular is the very foundation of genius.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged cognition/learning/understanding, philosophy/religion
[Max Nordau published Degeneration—which is, interestingly, available as a available for free download as a PDF here— in 1892; the book was a precursor to some of the “decline of the West” rhetoric the Nazi party employed. Given that Nordau himself was Jewish, and a co-founder of the World Zionist Organization, that fact remains a particularly bitter irony. It’s also important to remember that the Nazis famously mounted an exhibition called “Entarte Kunst” which means “Degenerate Art.” This exhibition of modernist art aimed to show the extent to which the works shown, many of them by Jewish artists, “insult[ed] German feeling.” Here, Nordau turns his withering gaze on one of the greatest of American poets, Walt Whitman.]
“He was a vagabond, a reprobate, and his poems contain outbursts of erotomania so artlessly shameless that their parallel in literature could hardly be found with author’s name attached. For his fame he has to thank just those bestially sensual pieces which first drew him to the attention of all the pruriency of America. He is morally insane, and incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, virtue and crime.”
Max Nordau, Degeneration, 1895.
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.”
H.L Mencken
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
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