John Baker’s Blog

A boy – an apprentice to the fisherman Peter Grimes – dies at sea. At the inquest, Grimes has to answer for the death. Was it an accident? Was it due to neglect? Or was it something worse? Most of the townspeople have already made up their minds. Only one or two, such as the [...]

At the Electronic Book Review Brian McHale has a new essay on postmodernism. He extracts quotations from Raymond Federman’s novel, Aunt Rachel’s Fur, of which the following is one.
So you find my novel too postmodern, wrong again Gaston, you’ve arrived too late, we are already beyond postmodernism, it’s dead, dead and gone, don’t you know, [...]

In my copy of Lorca’s Poet in New York -
I was on the terrace, wrestling with the moon.
Swarms of windows riddled one of the night’s thighs.
Placid sky-cattle drank from my eyes
and the breezes on long oars
struck the ashen store windows on Broadway.
- there is a translation, by Christopher Maurer, of a lecture which the poet [...]

A nice piece on Arthur Rimbaud from Ellis Sharp. These are extracts, but the whole article is worth your attention.
Rimbaud provides the exemplary example of a writer who packs it all in. What is even more astonishing than this case of a writer who quits is how early, in his case, it happened. Before his [...]