In the 20th century, the French essayic mind may have tunneled to its deepest riches in the works of the late Roland Barthes. French esthetics, like any country's, can be indigestible (and untranslatable), but in Barthes a teasingly light touch leads readers into the most baffling blind alleys where gold dust shines on the bricks. In the present collection, Barthes and translator Howard are well met, with Barthes' own density reining in Howard's usual galloping abstractions. This is the second to appear of three posthumous sheafs of Barthes' half-scientific, half-charlatanesque word-arias on art, history, science, literature, and the study of signs. What is the rustle of language? "The rustle denotes a limit-noise; the noise of what, if it functioned perfectly, would make no noise. To rustle is to make audible the very evaporation of sound; the blurred, the tenuous, the fluctuating are perceived as signs of a sonic erasure. And language—can language rustle? As speech, it seems doomed to stuttering; as writing, to silence and to the distinction of signs; in any case, there is always too much meaning for language to afford a delight appropriate to its substance. Yet what is impossible is not inconceivable. The rustle of language forms a utopia. Which one? The utopia of meaning's music. . . It is the shudder of meaning that I want to interrogate here, as I listen to the rustle of language—of that language which is my nature as a modern man." That should clear things up, and readers wishing to see such theory put into practice may investigate Robert Coover's new novel, Gerald's Party, in which hardly a single sentence or paragraph arrives anywhere without experiencing the poetry of deflection from its object. Perhaps the two outstanding essays herein are "The Death of the Author," about the breakdown of the authorial voice into several voices in a text, which are subsequently reconstituted into a Single voice by the reader; and "Leaving the Movie Theatre," about the hypnosis of cinema halls, the dancing beam of the projector, Barthes' distancing himself from the image, and his becoming unglued from the screen in "backing out" onto the street. Even these pleasures, as do the most ripely reachable of Barthes' thoughts, deliquesce into the kind of muggy clarity following a triple cognac. But one reads on, forever intrigued by Barthes' stripping off of stickum tape from one's mental appliances.
Pub Date: March 1, 1986
ISBN: 0520066294
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1986
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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