The Best of MINDFUL PLEASURES

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 "Mindful Pleasures Greatest Hits," at least a "Best of" CD. So here's my personal selection of the best things I've written on MP over the past ten years. (Click on the links to read the posts.)

• The Western Canon: A Beginner's Guide
• Six Waves of Modernism
• Digging The Tunnel; or, I Enter a Sentence by William H. Gass
• On the Great American Novel
• Quite Possibly the Funniest Commercial Ever Made
• The Long, Long, Long Sentence: An Interlinear Elegy for William H. Gass
• Three Kinds of Imagination
• The Sexual Surrealism of Meret Oppenheim and Man Ray
• The Good America
• Walking London in my Mind (for Roger Ebert)
• Curley's Glove: Interpreting a Sexual Symbol in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men
• MFA vs NYC vs Reality
• Finite Notes on Infinite Jest (Part 1 ; Part 2)
• Poetry After Auschwitz: What Adorno Really Said, and Where He Said It
• On the First Three Chapters of Joyce's Ulysses ("Telemachus"; addendum; "Nestor"; "Proteus")
• Pour Joyce: Eighteen Joycean Thoughts for Bloomsday (2011)
• On Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian (Post 1; Post 2; Post 3)
• My Sixty-Odd Literary Pillars (Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7)
• Why I am an Atheist
• The Proustian Simile
• On Jargon (with an attempt to explain Derrida in 279 nonjargony words)
• The Golden Rule of Storytelling (as exemplified by Breaking Bad)
• "The Trees" by Philip Larkin: A Close Reading
• Notes on Technology
• Transparency, Translucency, Opacity: Some Thoughts on the Continuum of Novelistic Prose
• On the Four Novels of W. G. Sebald (Vertigo; The Emigrants; The Rings of Saturn; Austerlitz)
• Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening": A Close Reading
• After Re-reading Shakespeare's Sonnets
• On Hemingway's May 28, 1934, letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4)
• Rambling Round Ulysses: A Blooming Blog for Bloomsday (2009)
• Notes on Proust's Swann's Way (Part 1; Part 2; Part 3)
• A Few Rules for Reading

And here are links to all of my "Adversaria" posts, lengthy collections of random ruminations, quirky quotes, and asinine alliterations culled from my utterly disorganized notebooks:

• Adversaria from the Summertime Notebook (2014)
• Additional Adversaria from the Summertime Notebook (2014)
• Adversaria 2015: Randoom Ruemynations of a Joycean Materialist
• Adversaria 2018