On the critical rhetoric typically deployed in defense of Griffith's Birth of a Nation and the films of Leni Riefenstahl:
When content is utterly repulsive, formalism will always be the first stop on the justification train.
A literary blog by Brian A. Oard
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Sacred Space: The round Reading Room at the British Museum
ABOUT THE BLOGGER
Brian A. Oard is the author of Suicide: A Memoir, as well as a collection of art criticism, Beauty and Terror: Essays on the Power of Painting, and a historical mystery novel, The Degas Manuscript. (Click on the last two titles to read them online.) He is also the creator of the epigrammatical blog Epigrams for Atheists. He lives in the United States, loves London and Paris, and enjoys the cheap objectivity of writing about himself in the third person. He can be contacted by email at baoard@aol.com.
The old library at Trinity College, Dublin
Blog Archive
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2016
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March
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- Digging THE TUNNEL; or, I Enter a Sentence by Will...
- Criticism as Art
- Some Recommended Art Books
- Epigrams for Writers
- CALL ME ISHMAEL by Charles Olson
- A Madness of Art
- Nonconformity
- OLIVE KITTERIDGE by Elizabeth Strout
- It's enough to make me choke to death on my second...
- THE POT OF GOLD by Plautus
- Junot Diaz's brief, wondrous quote on sf and imper...
- The View From Machu Picchu -- A Poem by B. A. Oard
- The Rules of Discourse -- A Poem by B. A. Oard
- Of Violence and Art -- A Poem by B. A. Oard
- Evening in the Park, Almost Alone -- A Poem by B. ...
- First Five Lines... -- A Poem by B. A. Oard
- Pieces of Poems / Poem in Pieces -- A Poem by B. A...
- Politicks -- A Poem by B. A. Oard
- Traveling Under Thomas Pynchon's Name -- A Poem by...
- Six Waves of Modernism: A New Periodization of Mod...
- A thought
- Fifteen Underrated Films
- To Trump: An Alphabetical Exercise in Invective
- Where is the 21st-Century Novel?
- On first looking into Derrida's Glas
- Thirteen Unspeakable Ideas
- Shitemonster Donald; or, Trump, Trump, Trump...The...
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March
(27)
ABOUT THE TITLE
The title of this blog was shamelessly stolen by the blogger (Mea culpa! Mea culpa! Me a culprit!) from a very good volume of literary criticism, Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, edited by George Levine and David Leverenz. (Little, Brown, 1976). As all true Pynchonians know, TP's working title for Gravity's Rainbow was Mindless Pleasures.
MY TOP SHELF: BEST OF THE BEST NOVELS
- ULYSSES by James Joyce
- THE TRIAL by Franz Kafka
- TRISTRAM SHANDY by Laurence Sterne
- THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail Bulgakov
- ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- MOBY DICK by Herman Melville
- IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME by Marcel Proust
- ABSALOM, ABSALOM! by William Faulkner
- WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy
- SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION by Gustave Flaubert
- NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
- BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy
- THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
- THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING by Milan Kundera
- THE GHOST WRITER by Philip Roth
- AUSTERLITZ by W. G. Sebald
- THE SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie
- AGAINST THE DAY by Thomas Pynchon
SOME GREAT BOOKS MOST PEOPLE HAVEN'T READ
- A COOL MILLION by Nathanael West
- AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- BEAUTIFUL LOSERS by Leonard Cohen
- CAMERA LUCIDA by Roland Barthes
- CENTURY OF THE WIND by Eduardo Galeano
- DOWNRIVER by Iain Sinclair
- FADO ALEXANDRINO by Antonio Lobo Antunes
- HUNGER by Knut Hamsun
- INVISIBLE CITIES by Italo Calvino
- JACQUES THE FATALIST by Denis Diderot
- L'ASSOMMOIR by Emile Zola
- MAN IN THE HOLOCENE by Max Frisch
- ON THE YARD by Malcolm Braly
- POEMS OF PAUL CELAN (trans. by Michael Hamburger)
- PUDD'NHEAD WILSON by Mark Twain
- SELECTED ESSAYS by John Berger
- THE ASPERN PAPERS by Henry James
- THE ATLAS by William T. Vollmann
- THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY by Edmund White
- THE BOOK OF DISQUIET by Fernando Pessoa
- THE LOSER by Thomas Bernhard
FAVORITE POETS
- Ovid
- Dante
- Shakespeare
- John Donne
- John Milton
- William Blake
- William Wordsworth
- J. C. F. Holderlin
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- John Keats
- Walt Whitman
- Emily Dickinson
- Charles Baudelaire
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
- W. B. Yeats
- Rainer Maria Rilke
- T. S. Eliot
- D. H. Lawrence
- Guillaume Apollinaire
- William Carlos Williams
- Hart Crane
- Wallace Stevens
- W. H. Auden
- Dylan Thomas
- Allen Ginsberg
- James Dickey
- Philip Larkin
- Robert Lowell
- Anne Sexton
- Pablo Neruda
- Paul Celan
- Seamus Heaney
- Richard Howard
- John Ashbery
SOME FAVORITE NONFICTION BOOKS
- A HISTORY OF NARRATIVE FILM by David A. Cook
- A LIFE OF PICASSO by John Richardson
- A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn
- AGAINST INTERPRETATION by Susan Sontag
- BASIC WRITINGS ON POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
- CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM by Edward Said
- DISPATCHES by Michael Herr
- EXISTENTIALISM FROM DOSTOYEVSKY TO SARTRE edited by Walter Kaufmann
- FICTION AND THE FIGURES OF LIFE by William H. Gass
- FOOTSTEPS: ADVENTURES OF A ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHER by Richard Holmes
- IMPRESSIONISM: ART, LEISURE AND PARISIAN SOCIETY by Robert L. Herbert
- INWARDNESS AND EXISTENCE by Walter A. Davis
- LIGHTS OUT FOR THE TERRITORY by Iain Sinclair
- MANUFACTURING CONSENT by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman
- OUT OF SHEER RAGE: WRESTLING WITH D.H. LAWRENCE by Geoff Dyer
- POSTWAR: A HISTORY OF EUROPE SINCE 1945 by Tony Judt
- REMBRANDT'S EYES by Simon Schama
- SEXUAL PERSONAE by Camille Paglia
- STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE by D.H. Lawrence
- THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE by Harold Bloom
- THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE by Edward Gibbon
- THE GAY SCIENCE by Friedrich Nietzsche
- THE GOD DELUSION by Richard Dawkins
- THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY by Paul Fussell
- THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS by Sigmund Freud
- THE RENAISSANCE by Walter Pater
- THE SHOCK DOCTRINE by Naomi Klein
- THE SHOCK OF THE NEW by Robert Hughes
- THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann
- UNITED STATES: ESSAYS 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal
- VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS by John Ralston Saul
Recommended Sites (alphabetical)
- Archer's Books
- Arts Journal
- Bookworm - KCRW
- Guardian (UK) books page
- London Review of Books
- Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Metropolitan Opera Radio Broadcasts
- Museum of Modern Art, New York
- National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
- New York Times Sunday Book Review
- Roger Ebert's website and blog
- Tate Museums website
- The Louvre
- The Nation
- The National Gallery, London
- The New York Review of Books
- The Paris Review
- Times Literary Supplement
- Vertigo: Collecting and Reading W.G. Sebald
- Walter A. Davis website
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