John Baker’s Blog

1.Why do you blog?
I maintain a weblog in order to:
. . . sustain & develop further a unique form of communication that enables me to write in reflective solitude in the traditional way, but also enables me to locate & interact with a critical readership almost immediately.
. . . be able to read across a [...]

The miraculous yield of 1922.
The year of Ulysses, The Waste Land, Rilke’s Dueno Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus(written in three days). Of Brecht’s first play, Baal, Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod. Virginia Wolfe’s Jacob’s Room, Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christy, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned Galsworthy’s The [...]

Modernism was, of course, concerned with the modern world. But it made a necessary distinction between the modern and the Modernist. The modern was a matter of period and historical phase; the Modernist a matter of art and technique, a peculiar twist of vision.
Modernism brought together, married, dallied with, rejected and played out the interconnections [...]