from The New Republic:

There are many ways to prop up a currency artificially. “We’re wrestling with the same stuff as Rilke,” Bono recently told The New York Times about Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the hapless Broadway wonder for which he collaborated on the music. More specifically, “Rilke, Blake, ‘Wings of Desire,’ Roy Lichtenstein, the Ramones.” I was not previously aware of the Rilkean elements in “Rockaway Beach.” Those elements Bono characterized as “the cost of feeling feelings,” which throws the Blakean dimension into question, but never mind. Precision is really not the point. That same month The New Yorker covered the appearance of Jay-Z—the good-guy memoirist who may now be seen in Kanye West’s video in praise of the murder of women—at the New York Public Library, and merrily reported that he was compared “to T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Shakespeare, and Dickens.” One of the authors of those comparisons was the clownish Cornel West, so they are perhaps less surprising. “West recalled a recent meeting between himself, Jay-Z, and Toni Morrison: ‘And you said, “I have been playing Plato to Biggie’s Socrates.’’ And that hit all of us so hard.’” And in that same mean month I read in The New York Times Book Review that Nora Ephron, who most resembles Erma Bombeck, is “like Benjamin Franklin or Shakespeare,” because “her words are now part of the fabric of the English language.” It was “white man’s overbite” that made her an immortelle.