Friday Links, November 26, 2021
+ Angela Alaimo O’Donnell talks back to Dante
+ Anthony Domestico critiques the first-ever biography of Elizabeth Hardwick
+ Aarik Danielsen reviews a work of graphic nonfiction about American loneliness.
Talking Back to Dante with Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
Dappled Things editor in chief, Katy Carl recommends this post on the Facebook page of poet Angela Alaimo O’Donnell:
Friends who were unable to attend our conversation "Talking Back to Dante: Dante & the Modern Reader's Imagination," here is the video.
All Lock, No Key ‘A Splendid Intelligence’
Katy Carl recommends the review at the above link. At Commonweal Magazine, professor and writer, Anthony Domestico critiques the recently published first-ever biography of essayist, critic, and fiction writer, Elizabeth Hardwick, by Cathy Curtis, who is also the “author of three studies of somewhat criticially neglected women artists” (according to the Wall Street Journal). Hardwick is most widely known as the first wife of poet Robert Lowell and as a founder of New York Review of Books. She is seen as a minor literary figure by some, but is highly regarded by many others, including Domestico, who refers to her as “one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.” And, he writes,
“From the mid-century until her death in 2007, Hardwick helped shape America’s literary conversation.”
Domestico says Curtis’s biography is not a bad book—it fails because, he writes that Curtis “doesn’t do what a biography of such a critic must do: tell us how the sentences work, how the intelligence becomes splendid on the page.”
In contrast, others at the publisher’s website have called it “splendidly intelligent,” a “triumphant biography,” a “complex, nuanced, and deeply perceptive portrait,” and one says, “Curtis has given Hardwick the stature, humanity, and writerly amplitude she deserves.” Admittedly these are the publisher’s blurbs, but they may actually hint that the Curtis biography is not to be dismissed on the basis of one review alone.
Other reviews with so stronger pros and with some cons of their own:
The New York Times: The Cutting Mind and Romantic Heart of Elizabeth Hardwick
The Wall Street Journal: ‘A Splendid Intelligence’ Review: The Incisive, Elusive Elizabeth Hardwick
The LA Review of Books: The Season of Hardwick
Lonely, But Not Alone
Katy Carl also recommends the above linked review by Aarik Danielsen at Curator Magazine of Kristen Radtke’s non-fiction graphic novel Seek You: A Journey Through American Lonelliness.
“ ‘I want us to use loneliness—yours, and mine—to find our way back to each other. I want us to play songs for each other on the radio,’ she writes. Then she gestures toward other modes and means of connection in a final paragraph too lovely to spoil.”
I love the cover. I used to have a view like that when I lived in the South End of Boston in my bohemian days in an artist’s studio built over a dented can warehouse. It was near the elevated train tracks, before the el was torn down and brought light and redevelopment money into the now trendy neighborhood along with a welcome relief from the din of the trains, the rattling and screeching of metal wheels meeting metal rails at all hours of the day and night. But I digress . . ..
