Intellectual Curiosities and Provocations

October 2003

Garrett Caples

Indie,
Modernism
Though surrealism as an artistic movement failed to live up to exactly what it sought to achieve, it seems that some young poets today have taken the surrealist example to heart and have made the idea their own -- thus creating a new genre which is exclusively molded within their mind's eye. Andre Breton is most probably rolling in his grave right now pointing his finger through a faded patch of grass overlooked by a stone.

Garrett Caples is one such young poet who's taken the surrealist example to heart.

Saintly Visions or Blind Faith?

Jazz Age
In his analysis of the narrator of The Great Gatsby, the critic A.E. Dyson remarks,"[Nick Carraway's] conscious moral instinct is to disapprove [of Gatsby]: but his imagination is fascinated since perhaps here, in this extraordinary man, the romantic promise is at last fulfilled" (Mizener, 116).

Banned!

Kid Lit
Have you had a gander at the American Library Associations "The Hundred Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000?" Number seven on the list is the Harry Potter series. As I recall, Rowling's latest book is some 800 pages and the kids are lining up at the library to check it out. Anyone who can inspire children to read an 800-page book deserves not only to be rich, but to be put at the top of the list for sainthood. Then there is the perennial favorite, Julie of the Wolves, a fantastic book by Jean Craighead George.

The Making of Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Kid Lit
The art of being both charming and profound while writing stories in which animals act like people is a difficult one. Cuteness for its own sake (and there is plenty of cuteness in Beatrix Potter's work, for example) would never have endeared Ms. Potter's overly commercialized Peter Rabbit to successive generations of enchanted fans if Peter were merely a cute bunny in human togs.