Category Archives: Vernacular dialects
Jane Austen’s Philadelphia, Toni Morrison’s Denver
January 30, 2013 2013 is the bicentennial of Pride and Prejudice, so I’ve been learning new things about Jane Austen — for instance, the fact that her aunt was named Philadelphia, Phila for short. Phila never saw Philadelphia; no, at … Continue reading
Muriel Rukeyser, Wallace Stevens: Books of the Dead
December 26, 1012 There’s a picture of the two of them – Stevens standing at the back, and Rukeyser seated in front with Marianne Moore. To the left of him from where they were, and to the left of … Continue reading
Ishmael Reed, Grateful Dead: Egypt
November 28, 2012 Ishmael Reed gets away with it. He is “a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra,” he says in the poem of that title. And he gets to do thisbecause Sonny Rollins has already set an example: Sonny … Continue reading
Louise Erdrich, Kurt Vonnegut: Germany’s Wars
November 21, 2012 There is a longer title to Kurt Vonnegut’s famous novel: “Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too … Continue reading
Edward Weston, Walt Whitman: Grass
November 7, 2012 Whitman, poet of New Jersey and New York. Also poet of grass, the force of demographics, what comes up from the ground. He would have been unsurprised by Hurricane Sandy, or by the rising sea levels … Continue reading
Jack Kerouac, Edwidge Danticat: Joual and Creole
October 10, 2012 The name on his birth certificate is Jean Louis Kirouac – that’s the most common spelling of the name in Quebec, which is where his parents were from. His father, Léon-Alcide, continued to work as a printer … Continue reading