Easy on the Eye

Check out this Sickert painting at wood s lot. I am mad about the color, even in this little pokey onscreen version. That ex-coronoer who writes murder mysteries with spies in them, Patricia Cornwell, wrote a nonfiction book purporting to prove that Sickert was Jack the Ripper. I actually read that dreadful book in Nevis. When you're on a desert island you can't be choosy.

Also if you scroll down the same page a bit you will see a links to a couple of other interesting things among the usual blither. (It is ever thus with them, so much of the sort of thing where you imagine some mousy little person mumbling it to an audience of academics, and everyone else in the room is successfully pretending to be enjoying it (believing it too!) and thinking it fascinating -- so subversive! -- or something and I'm the one who is sitting over to one side with my head nodding forward, asleep and unaware that I am drooling.) Oh, you think I'm bitter because I don't have an LTBP*, don't you? Well, you're wrong.

Pass over them to the essay by Clive Wilmer on Ted Hughes and translation. He's a good poet, nice man, too, as some of you may vaguely recall, who actually, you know, thinks when he writes.

The New Yorker has online a reminiscence by Gunter Grass, about his spell in the Waffen SS as a teenager. There was a little flurry of scandal about this some months ago.

*License To Be Precious, for the noncognoscenti.