Category Archives: Books

Twitching

26 May 2009 – 11:52 pm

Charles Ryder is on the move in A Twitch upon the Thread, which delivers a remarkable sentence just two pages into chapter one as he travels through Central America: I used to stuff a bundle of letters into my bag and read them when I felt inclined, which was in circumstances so incongruous — swinging [...]

By glenl | Also posted in Brideshead Revisited | Comments (1)

Revisiting Brideshead Yet Again

10 May 2009 – 4:03 pm

Like our narrator, I find myself “awed and bemused between two realities and two dreams” (15, last segment of the Prologue). And I am looking back on earlier encounters with the text and the PBS mini-series through the same sort of aged and, possibly, jaded lens with which our narrator revisits his own past associations [...]

By Randy Fromm | Also posted in Brideshead Revisited | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)

Reading in a well lit room: Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida

6 July 2008 – 11:38 am

So . . . our first foray off of the Time Magazine list. And one which has some relevance to the book just finished: Atwood’s The Blind Assassin. But, to that in a bit . . . Barthes is attempting to get at the idea of Photography or the Photograph (capitalized whenever used in that [...]

By Randy Fromm | Also posted in Camera Lucida | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (2)

‘as if’ – uncertainty, speculation, (re)presentation

3 June 2008 – 9:57 pm

This is going to be a post that will be edited now and again as I go along with this idea, in part because I am still refining my thoughts on it and in part because I don’t have all of the materials in hand today that contribute to the critical frame from which I [...]

By glenl | Also posted in The Blind Assassin | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2)