Alex Miller is a staff writer for The Curator and the co-author of A Bow From My Shadow (Ecco Qua Press, 2013), a collection of poems written in dialogue with poems by Luke Irwin. His work has appeared in The Millions, The Conversation, Transpositions, Pif, The Curator, Denver Syntax, Lake Effect, and Kenagain. He is a Lecturer in Western Literature at Gordon College, and an English and Rhetoric teacher. You can follow him on twitter @miller_jr
1922: The Year of Joyce and Proust
No one wants to read a book because it’s important. You have to anticipate some fresh and particular pleasure.
With the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and the death of Marcel Proust, it would be no exaggeration to call 1922 the year of the novel’s apotheosis. The genre had reached the forked peak of its perfection, strained to the limits of its possibilities. No novel composed since that year has been able to escape […]
A review of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi
As far as I can tell, one of the main reasons I haven’t been all that successful as a poet is that I’ve tried too hard to write good poems. As many unsold copies of my one published collection gather dust in an upstairs closet, the subsequent collection, which took me seven years to write, […]
A poem by Alex Miller Jr.
Putting Art (back) In Its Place
John Skillen argues that one cannot fully appreciate, or even adequately comprehend, the art of the Italian Renaissance without understanding the architectural, narrative, and liturgical contexts for which it was made.
Italo Calvino’s letters remind us how he wanted his work in fiction to “subtract weight,” to relieve human burdens.
FROM THE ARCHIVE: The Great Railway Bazaar
Almost forty years after its publication, Paul Theroux’s narrative of a train trip from Europe to Japan is still bandied about Goodreads and NPR summer reading specials as an essential travelogue.
Noteworthy: Aziz Ansari’s Master of None
The point of Master of None’s painstakingly awkward scenario humor is not just that the conversation about race in the world of film and TV still needs to be had, but that in the current climate, it might be impossible to have correctly.
On Reading, Memory, and the Literary Canon
On Alan Jacobs’ thoughts on authors as the “best new arbiters” of spiritual wisdom in our century, infusing literature with the power to witness.
Without true otherness, there can be no transcendence. Listen to Wikipedia is a small sign that ours might be an age of dwindling aesthetics.
Noteworthy: Clive James’s Life Sentence
The Australian poet and critic Clive James has just released two new books—a fine way to start a year when everyone thought you’d be dead.
On Poetry and Memorization
China’s Ban on Wordplay
The Migration of Robert Hass’s Poetry
“There are moments when the body is as numinous /as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.” -Robert Hass
In a violent world, violence is inherent to truth telling.
You said how often pleasure reads as loss—
Alex Miller on Li Bai, Baptist youth camps, and eastern philosophies of learning
Marty & Rust’s journey into the dark world of sexualized murder matters, not only because the art of it is well-rendered, but because it reminds us of the darkness in fetishes instead of fetishizing darkness.
Alex Miller Jr. on the rehabilitation of audience behavior at classical music concerts: knowing when silence is golden and when to throw a punch.
A poem by Alex Miller Jr.
The Western university is becoming financially untenable as the cultures so long fed by it invest more and more deeply in communications infrastructures that are basically dehumanizing. As the campus evaporates, where will the human element in the humanities reside? Clive James’s writing offers a comforting answer.
It would be difficult to find two less kindred twentieth-century cultural figures than Roland Barthes and Czesław Milosz, yet they shared a compulsion to identify the role of the author in a century whose violent conflicts had spilled confusion and fragmentation into its literature.
Fitting easily into the museum is an excellent criterion for the curator, but a poisonous one for the artist, and Hughes, who was a genius, should be allowed to make his genius mistakes.
Are we “forking over the soul of our civilization for an hour’s worth of booty shorts and explosions”?
We had thought we would be in Athens alone. In Iceland, a pimple of a volcano called Eyjafjallajökull had been erupting since April.
The Myth of Narcissus Goes Social
“Hold up!” your friend shouts while you walk back from the wharf at sunset, and you turn, to notice her ten paces behind, selecting a filter.
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