MINDFUL PLEASURES

When asked what it means to be a humanist in the twenty-first century, I like to quote, unoriginally, that locus classicus of humanism from ...

Here's a close reading of Robert Frost's little masterpiece of ambiguity, "The Road Not Taken". It's a poem commonly o...

This post inaugurates a new feature on Mindful Pleasures . The First Sentence Project will be a series of occasional close readings of openi...

Readers of this blog who've been wondering what the hell I've been up to for the past year can satisfy their curiosity by reading m...

I'm deeply impressed by this passage from a speech Philip Roth delivered at his 80th birthday celebration at the Newark Museum, March 19...

Now that Mindful Pleasures is over a decade old and past its 600-post mark, I guess it's time for a bit of curation--if not exactly a ...

Summer's coming. Time to trundle out the 40-gallon barrel of SPF90 sunscreen and spread it frosting-thick over all exposed flesh to defl...

Reading the pages on "The Rock" in Harold Bloom's Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate , I found the florid one's com...

A thought upon finishing the late M. H. Abrams' eminently reasonable, humanistic (and thus multiply deconstructible) critique of deconst...

For reasons unconscious, I'm finally reading Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining . I guess Gary Wills' definitive takedown of...

Amidst all the cat videos, conspiracy theorists, and painfully pathetic self-promoters on YouTube, the discerning searcher might even in the...

Yep, I'm bringing Mindful Pleasures back from the Valley of the Shadow (which only Orson knows...). After letting this blog lie liminal...

For my 600th post here at Mindful Pleasures (and likely my last for a while), a collection of random ruminations, pithy parentheticals, crab...

I'm inclined to agree with Picasso biographer John Richardson's view of Gertrude Stein as Modernism's preeminent example of arti...