One Year in a “Modernist Mosaic”: Kevin Jackson’s “Constellation of Genius” Reviewed

Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One by Kevin Jackson Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 544 p. Ezra Pound, that wild artist, muse, and patron of genius, referred to to 1922 as Year One of a new age. He felt so convinced of this idea that he began to date his letters  “p s U” – post scriptum Ulysses. That post-war year saw the publishing of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses, among other jewels of modernist art, so a […]

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The Reading Life: Reading “Dubliners” and Choosing Exile

I did not go to Ireland, Stephen Daedalus-style, to forge within the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of anyone at all, much less my race. But at 20, with a round face and dyed red hair, I did choose exile. I wanted to slough off the social anxieties of late adolescence, to return to a  primal state: wild and free. More pressingly, I left because my roommates were all going abroad. They hated college. I was more ambivalent, […]

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