MINDFUL PLEASURES

...because once I get started on the nacheinander and nebeneinander of Joycean thoughts it's really impossible to stop cold turkey (cue...

Bloomsday comes around again tomorrow like the lastfirst sentence of Finnegans Wake, and instead of adding a bit more to the Everest of ver...

If the medium of prose can be likened to window glass, then the major genera of novelistic prose (popular, literary, experimental) might be ...

Heidegger was an optimist. His adherence to dialectical form in the face of technology's challenge marks him, in fact, as a utopian idea...

" Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor ." -- Wallace Stevens, Adagia And metaphor, as Stevens also knew, is the ...

To begin, allow me a brief orgy of lit-geek bragging: I've read Infinite Jest (every jot, tittle, and footnote), and liked it enough to...

Charlie Rose justified his existence last night with a marvelous (as Mitt Romney might describe it) conversation about Picasso with John Ric...

You can always count on a dead New York Intellectual for a quote that bears repeating. Terry Teachout (in an appreciation of the nearly forg...

A citation in Ross Posnock's excellent critical study Philip Roth's Rude Truth led me to  this 2005 Bookforum article by editor Ge...

Thirty days ago I began what promises to be a year of our discontent (to put it mildly) with a reading of Beckett's The Unnamable , a de...

From George Steiner's very interesting Paris Review interview , a great epigram that ends with an image worthy of the third writer in St...

The following is a short fictional monologue based on historical fact , a side-product of my current novelistic project: My dearest Margar...

Among the wealth of interesting stuff at  UbuWeb (a site I've just discovered) is a complete online version of Mary Ellen Bute's ob...

There's an old European joke that becomes less true with every passing year: A person who speaks three languages is trilingual, a person...

Many critics were much too kind to The Kindly Ones . Not only is Jonathan Littell's trainwreck mash-up of Ernst Junger, Gert Ledig, Geor...

From 8mobili 's photostream on Flickr, here's a photograph of W. G. Sebald's 1961 blood donor card, containing a photo of the au...

This week of nationwide police repression of the U.S. Occupy movement, a reminder from Mayors Quan, Bloomberg et al that all repression is...

After a month's work on the book announced in my previous post, I've written my way through two distinct conceptions before finally ...

From Shelby Foote's Paris Review Interview , a classic collision of Hollywood and Literature: FOOTE: ...You’ve heard that thing about ...

The real problem with Huckleberry Finn has nothing to do with the novel's notorious and historically accurate 219 uses of the word ...

One of the many things Huckleberry Finn can teach us is that the worldview of American reactionaries has undergone remarkably little change...

My favorite scene in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is one of the few that doesn't end with blood spurting from an opened artery ...

One of the themes of Blood Meridian is the fundamental nihilism inherent in all ideologies of power: Manifest Destiny (most obviously in Ca...

Don't look away. We are not speaking in mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is ...

Richard White's King Ranch-size volume of  'New Western History' is an interesting, enlightening, sometimes exciting, sometimes ...

Cormac McCarthy suffered no sophomore jinx. Quite the opposite, in fact. Three years after his highly promising 1965 debut, The Orchard Keep...

While "The Last Good Country" is included in two collections of Hemingway's short stories (the Finca Vigia Edition Complete Sh...

The first book in Ellroy's already-classic LA Quartet ( The Big Nowhere , LA Confidential and White Jazz are the others), The Black Da...

I usually oppose prescriptive approaches to art, but even I have limits. Here are a few literary cliches that contemporary fiction writers s...

The Sunset Limited is that rare Cormac McCarthy work that doesn't go far enough. Ol' Cormac is usually dependably excessive, to say...