He’s got a great story in the new issue of The Southern Review. “No River Wide” is about sex and love and heartbreak, and Boswell does an interesting thing with time in the story.

Things I like about Jane Austen:
1) She has a wonderfully satiric omniscient voice.
2) She is a master of dramatic irony.
3) She influenced Ian McEwan, one of my contemporary favorites.
4) She is able to clearly delineate dozens of characters, mostly through dialogue.

Things I dislike about Jane Austen:
1) She writes about the upper class, a world too petty and trivial for this reader.
2) Like a lot of old English novelists, she creates quite a few extraneous subplots that I’m sure served as titillation in 1800 but that in 2007 feel a bit long-winded.

Fun fact: Emma was the inspiration for Clueless (thanks, Emo).

Countdown: she’s coming to Purdue in October. In other news, she has a new novel out, The Gravedigger’s Daughter. Here’s an excerpt from a review at Bloomberg:

“Joyce Carol Oates’s 36th novel ranks among her most accomplished, atmospheric and personal. It’s also one of her most frustrating — an epic saga that contemplates identity, power, love and death without attaining true cohesion.”

Not to pass any kind of judgment on a book I haven’t read yet (though it looks interesting), how many literary novels are there titled The ____’s Daughter? (Remember Grady Tripp’s novel in Wonder Boys–The Arsonist’s Daughter.) Maybe I’ll write one some day and win an award.

From CNN:

“The bald eagle, America’s national symbol, is flying high after spending three decades in recovery. On Thursday, the government took the eagle off the Endangered Species Act’s ‘threatened’ list.”

One of my favorite essays is Charles Baxter’s “Dysfunctional Narratives” from Burning Down the House. It’s a craft essay, and Baxter’s point is that characters who take responsibility for their actions are more interesting than those who don’t (it’s kind of a cardinal rule that you don’t want a victim character). But in making this assessment, Baxter examines the Nixon diaries, particularly the phrase “mistakes were made” (the essay came out in the early 1980s). Baxter points out how the passive voice is often a way to deny accountability. I’m sure he’s having a field day with contemporary politics.

I’ve been watching a Civil War documentary this week, and was struck by something Robert E. Lee said after the battle of Gettysburg. At one o’clock in the afternoon on the third day, he ordered Pickett’s Charge, and Confederate troops attacked a Union brigade dug in at the top of a hill. Union soldiers easily mowed down the Confederates, and this charge was arguably the turning point in the war, the moment the Union secured their future victory. During the Confederate retreat, Lee rode in on his horse and told the few stragglers who limped out of the battle, “This is all my fault.” He then wrote to Jefferson Davis, said again that it was his fault and offered his resignation (which Davis declined).

The Bookninja guy points to this New Yorker article about Barack Obama’s undergraduate poetry:

“In his first book, Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama described the marijuana that he smoked as a young man as ‘something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.’ This confession of youthful indiscretion was at once more sober and more lyrical than those proffered by Presidents Forty-two (‘I didn’t inhale’) and Forty-three (‘When was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible’), and it comes as little surprise to discover that another, less publicized intoxication to which the young Obama succumbed was the composition of lyric poetry.”

Harold Bloom offers up his critique, saying that while Jimmy Carter is “literally the worst poet in the United States,” and while William Cohen “keeps publishing terrible poetry,” Obama’s early poems show promise.