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 ...

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...

Here's the question (or one of them, at least) begged by the central thesis of Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel...

Perhaps the worst mistake in human history was made by those unknown people, lost in the dark backward of pre-literate time, who first decid...

While not Major Pynchon (that Bugs Bunny-playing-R. Lee Ermey military officer quired up from the pages of V. , The Crying of Lot 49 , Gravi...

Nabokov's The Enchanter , while impressively written and translated, is surely the most minor and conventional Nabokov book I've eve...

For me, Dostoyevsky is Notes from Underground and  Crime and Punishment , two of the most impressive works of fiction I've ever read, ...

Here's a video of a lecture in which Salman Rushdie introduces a classroom of apparently catatonic students to ten of his favorite books...

Jungian dream interpretation, as evidenced by the doctor's long essay on dream symbolism and alchemy ("Individual Dream Symbolism i...

George Steiner, proud diasporist, once lamented (in an interview conducted, unfortunately, by a woman who seemed intent on pressing into St...

As far as I know, Harold Bloom's sole public statement on the death of his friend Philip Roth is this paragraph posted on the Library of...

Here's a quote from Philip Roth that I don't recall reading in the last month's crop of obituaries and memorial essays: "...

Harpist . Marble. Late 2000s BCE. Height: 8.5 in. From the island of Amorgos in the Cyclades. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. ...

Summer is coming (even to Westeros, eventually), so it's time for some non-light but highly enlightening summer reading. This year I...

...yes and I'm streaming straight from my cuntsciousness Mollyblooming on this bluetiful boomsday ( shifting out of mockwakish into my n...

Add one more title to the list of undeservedly obscure American novels. Robert Roth's Sand in the Wind , the first major American litera...

Can something be made of the fact that John Updike's most explicitly religious, even theological, novel, 1975's A Month of Sundays ,...