Ed Simon is the editor at Belt Magazine and a staff writer emeritus for The Millions. He has contributed to, among others, The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, The Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney's, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Author of over a dozen books, his upcoming title Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost will be released by Ig Publishing in August of 2023. Email: edsimon310 [at] gmail.com
Website: https://edsimon.org/
by Ed Simon Impossible to know which one of those perennial evergreen subjects – love or death – poetry considers more, but certainly verse can be particularly charged when it combines those two. Love and death, the only topics worthy of serious contemplation, where anything else worth orienting the mind towards is merely an amalgamation…
by Ed Simon Alternating with my close reading column, every even numbered month will feature some of the novels that I’ve most recently read, including upcoming titles. I’m a sucker for a certain type of European novel, or if not actually European, something that trades in all of those connotations of that continent, of that…
by Ed Simon Bad poetry can tell us as much about the art of writing verse as can good poetry. Much can be learned by close reading poetry, which is well written, that has withstood the test of time or for which there is a general critical consensus regarding excellence in terms of technique or…
by Ed Simon The twentieth-century Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope” is among the more enigmatic concepts in literary theory, a discipline not defined by a deficit of them. In his 1937 essay “Forms of Time in and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” later published in his seminal collection The Dialogic Imagination,…
by Ed Simon Paradise Lost BOOK I Editor’s Synopsis – As the narrative of Homer’s epic poem The Iliad begins, the Trojan War whose violence it recounts is nearly at an end. Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector, and the rest of the invading Greeks had already been arrayed about the besieged city for a decade at the…
by Ed Simon Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature…
by Ed Simon Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature…
by Ed Simon Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe Though there are stories about people trading their souls with the devil in exchange for power and knowledge before, it was the English playwright Christopher Marlowe’s 1592 play that firmly entrenched that variety of character in the literary imagination. Incidentally there was a real Johann Faust in…
by Ed Simon Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature…
by Ed Simon “But then again, what has the whale to say?” wondered Ishmael in Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, “therefore the whale has no voice,” but this isn’t accurate. Sperm whales – of which Melville’s titular white whale is one – have an intricate series of clicks and bellows that if not language per…
by Ed Simon Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature…
by Ed Simon In Renaissance Europe, a Wunderkammer was literally a “Wonder Cabinet,” that is a collection of fascinating objects, be they rare gems and minerals, resplendent feathers, ancient artifacts, exquisite fossils. Forerunners to the modern museum, a Wunderkammer didn’t claim comprehensiveness, but it rather served to suggest the multiplicity of our existence on this…
by Ed Simon Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature…
by Ed Simon Past the regal bronze lions of Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s towering and triumphant column, up the steps of the National Gallery and behind it’s porticoed, columned, Regency façade, and on the second floor in room 34, the same place where the museum displays William Hogarth’s formal, yet warm, portrait The Graham Children…
by Ed Simon Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature…
by Ed Simon As an émigré from the dusty, sun-scorched Carthaginian provinces, there are innumerable sites and experiences in Milan that could have impressed themselves upon the young Augustine – the regal marble columned facade of the Colone di San Lorenzo or the handsome red-brick of the Basilica of San Simpliciano – yet in Confessions,…
by Ed Simon I’m haunted by the enormity of all of that which I’ll never read. This need not be a fear related to those things that nobody can ever read, the missing works of Aeschylus and Euripides, the lost poems of Homer; or, those works that were to have been written but which the…
by Ed Simon “Men intoxicated are sometimes stunned into sobriety.” —Lord Mansfield (1769) Today marks eight years since I had my last drink. Or maybe yesterday marks that anniversary; I’m not sure. It was that kind of last drink. The kind of last drink that ends with the memory of concrete coming up to meet…
by Ed Simon I am condemned to be free. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness Well, I wish I could be like a bird in the sky, how sweet it would be if I found I could fly, Oh, I’d soar to the sun and look down at the sea, and then I’d sing ’cause I’d…
by Ed Simon What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know. —Augustine, Confessions (397) Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once. —Richard Cummings, The Girl in the Golden Atom (1922) Twenty-six years…