“A good read.” That expression is everywhere about us these days. However humble its beginnings, its incorporation into the critical lingo of the established literary press has vested it with apparent respectability. Before long, William Safire or another student of picturesque usage will comment on the origins and spurious legitimacy of this recent attachment to our linguistic arsenal. It is perhaps no accident that it was an expert on the allegory of language—and an erstwhile Californian—who introduced this designation some two years ago into the solemn deliberations of the PMLA editorial board. Unfortunately, I cannot recall the specific manuscript that incited this spontaneous and pithy assessment; but I do know that the newfound objective measure took immediate root as one of the board's many evaluative criteria. Most likely, the term fastened onto a way of perceiving and reading that we had been engaging in all along but for which no such neat tag had been readily available.

In his General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer presents three major attempts at authorial voicing. Through the voices of his “clerk,” his pilgrim, and Harry Bailly, he explores the poet's roles and the limits of poetry. A clerkly voice, assuming the authority of a philosopher, speaks the opening eighteen lines. The pilgrim, who occupies a privileged position among the three voices, guides the central section of the Prologue, as he defines a complex, tenuous, dialogic relationship with his materials—the other pilgrims and the mortal world. The last of the voices—Harry Bailly's—introduces a theory of poetry as mirthful distraction, unmoored in the quest for truth. Chaucer's multivoiced exploration of poetic authority dramatizes a wide range of medieval attitudes toward poetry. The poet's purpose is not to arrive at a “correct” notion but to raise questions about what fiction and language can and cannot do.

A neighborhood in Mexico City called Colonia Juárez has given all its streets the names of foreign, mainly European, cities. It is an old neighborhood, extensive and populous, formally caught between the boundaries of the two greatest metropolitan avenues, Insurgentes and Reforma.