Song of a Reformed Headhunter

As part of my private Marlon Brando film fest, last Thursday I watched The Godfather (1972), directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and based on a 1969 novel of the same name by Mario Puzo. I was suitably impressed by this film which is, according to Wiki, rated as the second greatest film in American cinematic history (behind Citizen Kane ), in the American Film Institute's list.  The story, spanning 10 years from 1945-55, chronicles the fictional Italian American Corleone crime family, beginning with the downfall of the patriarch Don Vito (played by Brando) and ending with the reestablishment of power by his unlikely successor, the third son Michael (played by Al Pacino), a war hero and college graduate.  The last scene brilliantly shows Michael acting as godfather to his nephew at the latter's baptism, his crime associates kissing his ring as if he were a pope. If the plot of the film traces the reluctant development of Michael into his father's heir, its theme is about the i...

Literary Imagination is a journal of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (ALSC), published by OUP. It is edited by Peter Campion. After joining ALSC, I received the journal in May (?), but put it aside for summer reading. It is a pleasure to read.  The academic articles are scholarly but not overly specialized, with useful explanatory footnotes and references. They are written in clear, accessible prose, more formal than the belle lettristic, but without the technical vocabulary of Theory. I especially enjoyed James Sitar's transcription of a talk by Robert Frost, Janet Gezari's "Kurtz's Night Table" (which approaches the teaching of Heart of Darkness through Coppola's Vietnam war film Apocalypse Now ), John Koethe's "Wittgenstein and Lyric Subjectivity," and William Edinger's "Yvor Winters and Generality: A Classical/Neoclassical Perspective." The last is particularly insightful, in describing the greatness in Winters...