Word: nobelity
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Even readers who tend to veer away from poetry find themselves propelled toward the work of Derek Walcott. It's not just because the West Indian Nobel laureate has the classic gift of mixing ease with eloquence and of deepening, dignifying his most private moments with the high and burnished diction of a sunlit Shakespeare. Even more, Walcott has strained and struggled all his life to match sun and rain, to marry the world of autumn leaves and opera houses that he learned to love on paper with the unrecorded "pomme-arac" and fireflies of his long-colonized islands...
...Bounty (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 78 pages; $18), Walcott's first collection of poems since he won the Nobel in 1992, finds the 67-year-old wanderer sitting on the veranda in the last indigo hour of the day, "watching the hills die" and imagining a world where he will exist no more. All the master's gifts are prodigally displayed here: an ear that finds liquid music in "fast water quarrelling over clear stones," a wit that sees death--the state of wordlessness--as "beyond declension," and an attentiveness that not only observes squirrels "spring up like questions" but also...
DIED. CHARLES WERNER, 88, Pulitzer-prizewinning cartoonist; near Indianapolis, Ind. Werner sketched for the Indianapolis Star for 47 years, but his winning image was done for the Oklahoman. Drawn shortly after the Sudetenland was handed over to Hitler in 1938, it proved sadly prophetic: a scroll marked NOBEL PEACE PRIZE lies beside a gravestone bearing the epitaph CZECHOSLOVAKIA...
...comedy club, where nutty professors delivered papers on "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl." Three years ago, when Alter's group came together, some of the biggest names in American letters signed on, including scholars Alfred Kazin and Roger Shattuck, novelist Cynthia Ozick, poet Donald Hall and the late Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. "I don't think the MLA is the evil empire," says Alter, who maintains membership in both groups. "It's an umbrella organization. But academic people are conformist. With 30,000 people under one big top, you have a lot of conformism...
...Force-base magazine, through a stint as a TIME copy boy, to his first best seller, Hell's Angels, in 1967. There are absurdly elaborate screeds to collection agencies and complaints to banks about the color of his checks. The proud highwayman wrote to William Faulkner, suggesting that the Nobel laureate send him money; to President Johnson, nominating himself for the governorship of American Samoa; to the Postmaster General, protesting the introduction of Zip Codes...