Procrastinatory tidbits

At the NYRB blog, James Gleick ponders the OED's new and novella-length entry for the word "information."

At the LRB, Michael Wood reflects on linguistic similarities and differences between Lewis Carroll and James Joyce (the piece also quotes, appealingly, a pun from Walter Redfern's book, which I now covet but do not think I will be able to get electronically: "A person who has been given bits of greenery for her birthday instead of the colourful flowers she was hoping for decides to make the best of things. She says: ‘With fronds like these, who needs anemones?’").

Pale Galileans

At the TLS, Jonathan Bate on Swinburne's posthumous reputation. The article persuasively makes the case that Swinburne is well worth reading, after this pungent statement of the arguments against:

F. R. Leavis’s charge sheet, in one of his Cambridge seminars (recorded by Charles Winder), requires a robust defence. “Swinburne: Tennysonian, subordination of sense to sound, lapsing away from the sense. Use of words: what could happen after Swinburne? Gilbert Murray’s Euripides happened.” A wash of words with no meaning, the logorrhoea that gives poetry a bad name, the decadent clutter that had to be swept away by the austere lucidity of the Imagists: that was the judgement of my schoolmasters on Swinburne’s verse. He may have been English poetry’s greatest technical innovator of anapaest and iamb in bounding alternation: “When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces, / The mother of months in meadow or plain” (Atalanta in Calydon). But he was all too easily parodied as a purveyor of high-sounding nonsense: “When the foam of the bride-cake is white, and / The fierce orange-blossoms are yellow” (Lewis Carroll, “Atalanta in Camden Town”).