Othello’s love for Desdemona is intense and exhilarating to him, but it’s fragile, for it has come at a cost. This warrior, an older man, different in race and background, celebrates his passion for his beloved even as he wonders whether the sacrifice of his freedom was worth it. Has he given up too much, lost more than he gained? That’s Othello’s fear, the vulnerability Iago exploits.| Slant Books
I picked Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 mostly because, at the time, the sonnet’s edgy tone about the drive to tamp down the earthly passions–—something I was personally dealing with at the time!-—cohered to my own struggles. I scrawled the poem in cursive on notebook paper over and over, trying to memorize it, and in memorizing it, it became a part of me—a part of my body, really| Slant Books
My friend and colleague Robert Garis died in January 2001, age 75. Bob was a superb close reader, maybe the best I have ever met, vivid and exact in his responses to literature, and to film, ballet, and music as well. I admired Bob tremendously, his seriousness and intensity, and his joy too, his pleasure in being in the company of exceptional authors, composers, directors, and choreographers.| Slant Books
It’s a pleasure to reread and analyze this first quatrain of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, looking at it and listening to it, the puzzles it generates and the questions it raises, and I am tempted to proceed to the rest of the sonnet. But in this post, I have another purpose, and that’s to quote and pay tribute to William Empson’s interpretation of the line about “choirs” in chapter 1 of his 1930 masterpiece of literary criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity.| Slant Books
