Jim Bowman gets a chuckle out of the TLS letter about Kazin

http://blithespirit.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/todays-chuckle/

And Bowman recalls Mike Gaynor's great piece on Brodhead.
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/gaynor/070607

A 2-for blog piece.
Today’s chuckle . . .

. . . from Times Literary Supplement, 10/7/11 (subscription only), letter to editor from reader Hershel Parker:

Shaken by your opening of This Week (September 30) and by the first line of Zachary Leader’s review of Alfred Kazin’s Journals, two separate places where Kazin is said to have died in 1988, I staggered down to consult my 1997 diary for February 25.

That night I felt certain that Kazin, Paul Metcalf and I talked about Melville together at the Union Square [NYC] Barnes and Noble.

My comments in the diary are not respectful of the man presenting himself as Kazin, but they clearly are based on my belief that he was there, however diminished.

Diminished belief is a terrible thing.

Parker is a Melville scholar of renown, who also, as it happened, in 2007 nailed the Duke U. president in the aftermath of the lacrosse team accusation scandal, as a man who can be trusted not to be trustworthy.

Alfred Kazin--Still Unruly and Pompous and Aggressive--and Never a Real Scholar

TLS 7 October 2011

My diaries are indeed devoid of respect for Kazin, who pontificated about poetry being only a sideline of Melville's and something he was not very good at. I may transcribe the notes I made then, in 1997.

7 October 2011

In the next week's TLS Robert Alter takes issue with what Leader says about his role in a passage in Kazin's journals.