Tag Archives: literary oddities

Saul Bellow on Demagoguery

Posted on January 25, 2017 | 1 comment

“The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are as clever as he.”

Saul Bellow

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.

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Rotten Reviews: Thomas Paine

Posted on January 18, 2017 | Leave a comment

“Shallow, violent, and scurrilous.”

William Edward Hartpole Lecky, A History of England in the 18th Century, 1882

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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Rotten Reviews: James Agee and Walker Evans

Posted on January 6, 2017 | Leave a comment

“There are many objectionable passages and references. I am sorry not to be able to recommend this book for the subject is an important one.”

L.R. Etzkorn, on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in Library Journal

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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Rotten Reviews: T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

Posted on December 20, 2016 | Leave a comment

“Mr. Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse; but that is all. For the rest, he has quoted a great deal, he has parodied and imitated. But the parodies are cheap and the imitations inferior.”

New Statesman

“…it is the finest horses which have the most tender mouths and some unsympathetic tug has sent Mr. Eliot’s gift awry. When he recovers control we shall expect his poetry to have gained in variety and strength from this ambitious experiment.”

Times Literary Supplement

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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Rotten Reviews: Emily Dickinson

Posted on December 7, 2016 | Leave a comment

“An eccentric, dreamy, half-educated recluse in an out-of-the-way New England Village–or anywhere else–cannot with impunity set at defiance the laws of gravity and grammar…. Oblivion lingers in the immediate neighborhood.”

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Atlantic Monthly, 1892

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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Rotten Reviews: On Charles Dickens

Posted on November 29, 2016 | Leave a comment

“We do not believe in the permanence of his reputation…. Fifty years hence, most of his allusions will be harder to understand than the allusions in The Dunciad, and our children will wonder what their ancestors could have meant by putting Mr. Dickens at the head of the novelists of his day.”

Saturday Review, 1858

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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Rotten Reviews: Alice in Wonderland

Posted on November 22, 2016 | Leave a comment

“We fancy that any real child might be more puzzled that enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story.”

Children’s Books

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

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Timestyle, Time-ese

Posted on March 8, 2016 | Leave a comment

I’ve always enjoyed this squib from David Grambs’ The Random House Dictionary for Readers and Writers (New York: Random House, 1990) which appears, alas, to be out of print.

“Timestyle, Time-ese n. The characteristically heady and melodramatically compressed prose style of Time magazine, with particular reference to its zesty verbs, marshaled characterizing adjectives and hyphenated compound words, clever coinages and puns, and above all (formerly) the frequent use of verbs  at the beginnings of sentences and hence inverted syntax.

Brain child of joke-making, china-dog-collecting, cordovan-shoe-wearing Briton Hadden more than Time co-founding, beetle-browed, baggy-britched Henry Luce was Timestyle. Wrote Wolcottt Gibbs in a New Yorker profile of Luce: ‘Backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind. Where it will end, knows God!’ Ended has inversion since Godwent Luce.'” –John B. Bremner, Words on Words

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Edmund Wilson’s Refusal Card

Posted on September 22, 2015 | Leave a comment

The great American literary critic Edmund Wilson, of whom I have long been an great admirer, was famous for his refusal card, which I’ve reprinted here. At some point, I’ll rewrite this for public school teachers. Is there anything or anyone in particular to which or whom you would like to say no?

“Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him without compensation to:

read manuscripts

contribute to books or periodicals

do editorial work

judge literary contests

deliver lectures

address meetings

make after-dinner speeches

broadcast;

Under any circumstances to:

contribute to or take part in symposiums

take part in chain-poems or other collective compositions

contribute manuscripts for sales

donate copies of his books to libraries

autograph books for strangers

supply personal information about himself

supply photographs of himself

allow his name to be used on letter-heads

receive unknown persons who have no apparent business with him.”

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