A little while ago, the estimable Phil Christman interviewed me on his substack. It’s a good interview, I think, and covers a range of things. One of the questions Phil asked was: ‘What was the first piece of literary criticism that made you realize that criticism could also be written…

[Previously in this series: Genesis 9. The NKJV text of this chapter is here.] Tune: “I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major General” There’s Japheth, Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan and Naphetehim Tubal, Meshech, Tiras, Riphath, Ashkenaz and Dodanim Togarmah and Javan, Elishah and Tarshish-Anamim Kittim, Ham and Cush and Put and Zeba…

:1: From the earliest iterations of The Prelude, Wordsworth built his poem around various ‘Spots of Time’: each one a remembered moment, vividly recreated in Wordsworthian blank verse, of intense experience or apperception he had had in his life. These spots possess not just in-the-moment intensity, transcendent acuteness and borderline-inexpressible…

It so happens that I live, for non-equine reasons, in Ascot, Berkshire, a settlement dedicated (as the anthropologists might say) to the worship of the horse. Ours is a single high-street, containing a dozen-or-so human shops, loured over and overwhelmed by an absolutely colossal stadium in which horses are paraded…

[Previously in this series: Genesis 8. The NKJV text of this chapter is here.] . [1–7] God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them: “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.” God added: “items to be multiplied are called the factors. The item to be multiplied is…

I’ve been reading some Pindar lately — as you can see, from my previous post to this blog — and this is a short note branching off from that. So: in David Markson’s aptly-title The Last Novel (2007), we get this: When the city I extol shall have perished, when…

I stand by that title. Though this is a serious post, and that title might make you think otherwise. Ah well. In Pindar’s fourth Pythian Ode — the longest surviving choral ode we have — a strange story is told. The ode begins, as Pindar’s odes do, by celebrating a…

And so you’ve killed me, seethish lad, Thropt off my head with your znarp knife — Then skeebled joyous to your dad: To boast you took a life! I only meant to greeb hello. Like puppy-dog, I scantered up With claws insheathéd hand and toe: Tongue lolling, but jaws shut. …