Tag Archives: tls
Rating the Blighters in the Penny Press!
As we’ve so often noted about the Penny Press, the Lord giveth, and the Lord talketh out His ass. Such was certainly the case with last week’s TLS, in which the ‘debit’ column had an item that nearly made me spit up my Tatws Pum Munud in outrage. The offending piece was by Jonathan Benthall, [...]
The Perils of Politeness in the Penny Press!
My Open Letters Monthly colleague Rohan Maitzen recently alerted me to a brou-ha-ha boiling in the Canadian lit-scene, sparked by a well-written and near-disastrously wrong-headed article on the CWiL (Canadian Women in the Literary Arts) website called “The Ethics of Negative Reviewing.” The piece is by Jan Zwicky, and in it, she covers a whole [...]
Pleasures a-Plenty in the Penny Press!
The dark days of the Penny Press appear to be over, but that might be connected to the fact that my reading today was from three of the most reliable sources of periodical enjoyment currently on the market. First up was my Bible, the mighty TLS, which featured a very peppy review by Alex De [...]
Badly Infected in the Penny Press!
My last few scrapes with the Penny Press left me thinking things might not be able to get any worse, but I was wrong: things hit rock bottom when I read this sentence in a review by Guy Dammann in the 2 March TLS: “In Don Giovanni, the general consensus was that the opera ended [...]
Uppity primates in the Penny Press!
Jumping (somewhat belatedly) into the fray of 2012′s Penny Press, we find the party in full swing, which is always inviting. In the 6 January TLS, for instance, Mary Kenny writes a letter whose simple honesty about the late Christopher Hitchens will be cried down instantly by the millions of arrested adolescents who jumped on [...]
Scurrilous Behavior in the Penny Press!
We’ve had a typically tumultuous year with the Penny Press in 2011, as you might expect. After all, the world of periodicals and the world of blogging share in common a certain element of headlong momentum that dissipates during the gestation of boring old books. In the world of deadline prose, outrageous positions aren’t properly [...]
The Folds of Irony in the Penny Press!
Juicy or jaunty, irony abounds in the latest harvest of the Penny Press!
Some High Notes in the Penny Press!
I’ve fallen frightfully behind – not in my Penny Press reading (as so many slackers might) but in my Penny Press reporting: issue after issue cascades by, and I read and absorb them all, but then I get caught up in making lists or fighting pointless gender battles (not to mention fighting my own phlegm [...]
Right and Wrong (and a little comfort) in the Penny Press!
Ordinarily, the running disagreements I have with the Penny Press are matters of degree, of shading, and they’re conducted sotto voce over a heaping plate of food in the little hole-in-the-wall restaurant I frequent solely for the purpose of keeping up with all my periodicals. It’s rare that these disagreements aren’t essentially pleasant things, the [...]
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