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Wilde's sardonic wit and ineffable satire had me enchanted from page one. Wilde writes with devastatingly appealing witticisms, and with a style and cleverness matched by few other authors. It is said that he is one of the more oft-quoted authors in the English language, and I now understand why.
In addition to axioms and aphorisms of pure genius, the plot both captivates and surprises the reader. Lady Windermere discovers that her husband has been cheating on her, and a folly of misunderstandings and poor advice then unfolds; all the while satirizing society.
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And one thousand pages for $15? C'mon, this is well worth the price of a pizza! Of course, this is not something you would read word for word, but I have used it more than once to help me understand a play that I was about to see. However, you need to set aside the better part of an hour to read the article on the history and background of any one of his plays. There is also plenty of info on his other writings, including the sonnets. Besides visiting the reconstructed Globe theatre (which I have had the privilege of doing), owning this book is the only other requirement for the serious Shakespearean student/fan.
My sole complaint is that the lettering is rather small (is is 7 pt or 8 pt? my eyes couldn't tell--ouch!). But hey, what do you expect for $15? A 2,000-page book?
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Also recommended: "Pentatonic Scales for the Jazz Rock Keyboardist" by Jeff Burns.
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The three remaining chapters recapitulate and strengthen Halpern's thesis that in poetry, sodomy and the sublime are, perhaps not at all paradoxically, related. A brisk rehearsal of the the old Derrida-Foucault debate about reason and madness appears in a reading of Oscar Wilde's "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." Here, Halpern teases out the sexual subtext of Derrida's 1996 anniversary tribute to his late teacher, in which he (Derrida) confesses to feeling intense, multiple repercussions deep inside. These must be "the aftershocks of theoretical sodomy," Halpern writes. After all, Derrida "is nothing if not a pushy bottom." In a stunning chapter on Freud's reading of Leonardo da Vinci's "St. Anne with Two Others," Halpern draws on Lacan's analogy of the map in his "Seminar on the Purloined Letter" to note that the infamous vulture on Anne's lap "does not occupy the representational depth of the painting but rather is splayed flatly across the surface of the canvas, at once obvious and invisible." It persists, Halpern writes, as a dead leftover - presumably a smelly one at that. In a strangely sober analysis of Lacan's reading of an icky, twelfth-century poem by Arnaut Daniel (involving the proposed ingesting of bodily waste as part of a test to win a fair lady's hand....whatever), Halpern concludes that as a vessel, the anus is considered "improper" because it can't hold seed. In the discourse of sodomy, he continues, "the anus is the paradigmatically empty space, the vessel as absolute void."
Halpern's point, finally, is that poets and sodomites share a creative process that is something quite different from a procreative process. I was left wondering what T.S. Eliot would say about this and turned to "The Waste Land" (which covers much the same rugged terrain as Halpern's book); I imagine he would simply cry "Jug jug" to dirty ears.
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Senator Mike Fair
Oklahoma State Senator
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A pedestal of immortality, but I want you in the here and now; in the existent.
Assigning you 4-stars is akin to the betrayal of a friend.
For your dog-eared pages has backpacked peaks with me; your spine water-stained with a tendency to distend.
But you try too hard capturing poets and poetry alike through the ages.
There is too much of you and too little of Cummings, of Lowell, of Whitman among the other sages.
There is no poet's life and who and where
There is only the poet's strife and your title's cavalier.
But I dog you no further down for your dog-eared pulp has brought me much not leaving my wallet forsaken,
For in your ambition you have failed not to include Housman, Santayana, and Aiken.
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Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Perpignan