I just completed my first real pulp thriller best-seller in years (I used to love Fontana paperbacks featuring parka'd men scrambling on ice floes with ice picks) - the penultimate Lee Child. It is, at times, shockingly misogynistic, violent, and even borderline racist (or at least the main character is). Edward Said would not have been amused, in the least. Child is not the new Chandler, as some have claimed, but he might be a new sort of Spillane. Jack Reacher has some intriguing characteristics. A pity he seems to hold dimestore views about le monde Arabe - a far more complex and valuable cultural space than his post-911 worldview (or the one his creator cynically adopts to sell books to the airport everyreader) seems to admit. I am breaking my promise not to blog over the Spring break - okay, will try to keep my mitts off this blog for a few days.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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