Lectures in America

These are spoken lectures stripped of the tone, stress, and pauses a live audience would have caught, and reading them on the page feels to reviewer after reviewer like reading a bad transcript. One reader asks the obvious question outright: “why not just publish a CD?” Others report the associative, repeating method simply doesn’t land, one writing flatly that it “lost me and it didn’t reach me.” The opening lectures on literary history draw only general comment, the least quotable stretch next to Poetry and Grammar and Portraits and Repetition. Without punctuation cues to mark pause or stress, sentences readers might find playful in short fiction stretch out here “without the tones and stress and stops and correct punctuations” that would make them legible as speech.