It took me some time to realize this myself, and the organization of the book itself doesn't quite help, either -- instead of a chronological, book-by-book selection of poems, Bender is arranged alphabetically.
Mr. Plumly, himself a poet, has carefully chosen not to tell Keats's story in linear or chronological order; his book is a series of interlocked essays that circle (sometimes repetitiously) around certain themes.
The results were compiled in a two-volume book: "Chronological Archives of Historical Earthquakes in China" (Historical earthquake working group of Seismological Committee of Academia Sinica 1956).
JI: It's more chronological to the book, I was also looking at it as a companion piece, so that was a whole different thing.
In a series of non-chronological vignettes, the book moves through enough snappy, barbed anecdotes to save it from navel-gazing, and enough harsh soul-searching to rescue it from triviality.
Despite the roughly chronological structure of her book, she treats the basic terms of her discussion -- above all beauty -- as timeless universals.
Because the structure of the new book is chronological, it reads like a highly selective and unsatisfactory autobiography, and because the Kinney and Bernstein biographies made such heavy use of the letters, it can't help echoing them.
(The one exception may be Duvivier's "Man's Neck," based on a relatively lighter Maigret novel, though even there the story is rejiggered in chronological fashion and the book's dramatic opening scene is jettisoned).
The 70-minute work, composed by Joshua Fineberg and directed by Jim Clayburgh of the Belgian theater company Joji Inc., is less an opera in any conventional sense than a multimedia monodrama: the actor François Beukelaers, a Humbert caged within what amounts to a courtroom dock in front of the stage, recounts episodes from the book in chronological sequence.
The city in question is Bombay, whose ambition is visualised, over the book's chronological span of several years in the 1980s, in passages that observe new building on land reclaimed from the sea, or luxury apartment blocks sprouting incongruously in the middle of treeless wastelands.
