A Momentary Taste of Being

On "Neutral Tones" A masterpiece of a poem and inspiration for one of my earlier poems also inspired by the language of Finnegans Wake.

Allegra Goodman v. Jonathan Franzen Even from the brief description, it appears that I would need to look into the book by Ms. Goodman.  It sounds too good to be missed. When people have sex in Freedom, heads bang on walls. In The Cookbook Collector it's a finger on the chest and then fade out. There are great flights of imagination in The Cookbook Collector – like the scene where George stumbles upon a collection of 17th-century manuscripts in the cabinets and ovens of a musty kitchen: "For a moment, he thought she was searching for the iodine, and then he saw them. Leather-bound, cloth-bound, quartos and folios, books of every size."  I'll spare you the rest of that paragraph.  In all, it sounds to me like Goodman wins hands down.  So why so little acclaim--read the article to find out.

Thucydides on American Foreign Policy Wonderful reading.  A glance tells us why reading the classics is a good practice beyond the mere exercise for the mind.

On accentuating the negative in book reviews

I have two more zombie books to read--one of which I'll report on shortly, and one that should follow quickly behind after I get an SF I've been dying to read out of the way.  But this is a way station report. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the literature of zombies (as opposed to the vast majority of mash-ups and gore-fests that celebrate the Zombie as an object of terror) is primarily a literature of anger.  Or so it seems on brief exposure.  In each of the two novels (admittedly a very small sample, but what I'm generating right now is a working hypothesis) that take the subject as more that a gore-fest, the primary message has been that zombies act according to nature.  Nature red in tooth and claw, but nature none-the-less.  In each case as well, the acts perpetrated by those who can choose to go against nature are by far and away worse than those that come from beings acting as beings. What do we infer or read from this?  One can app...

Critique of Wells Tower

Realism Does Not Equal Adult--a follow-up I agree with the essential point here--the trappings do not so much matter and define a book as adult material--it is the sensibility, themes, and contexts that allow for a work to have a more mature sensibility.

Hitchcock's Angles Much of this strikes me as very worked up and not really good interpretive theory.  On the other hand, I am not a scholar nor even a good student of film, so I'll leave it to others who understand the medium better to draw conclusions. Ovaphobia

Some half-formed, less-than-half thought out gropings toward meaning.  To be continued--perhaps. When looking at much modern fiction it often seems that the art of story telling has been lost. One reads through reams of metafictional games and post modern pandering to self.  Ulysses does not really tell a story, but collectively, we seem to have forgotten that meaningful books without story are the exception, not the rule. Literature as game-playing has a long and interesting history--but like modern art and much of classical music in the last 50 years, one begins to feel tired of the avant-garde blather of the modern literary world.  Is Paul Auster really all that?  What about something like The Interrogative Mood--is that really meaningful or powerful or memorable fiction.  Even Jennifer Egan's powerpoint display of text as part of A Visit to the Goon Squad --what is that all about, really--how does it really enhance the story.  I am surprised and a ...

The Realms of Fantasy

Reading Hardy's Poetry

And I'm pro anything contra-Dennett

For your consideration-- The Lord of the Flies

Practically the only reason I'm linking to yet another article about Finn-N is so I could use the header

Dialogue in the Novel. As always, Prof. Myers educates in a highly readable and thoughtful way.  It sometimes makes one wish one had something to say.

Mark Atithakis D. G. Myers

Is Theology Threadbare? I love the implicit chronological chauvinism that seems to suggest that the current understanding of Science is indeed the only understanding of science that has any meaning.  If we choose to so confine our definitions, then there can be no reasonable debate and the question asked is mooted because it cannot be addressed in terms of science, it must be addressed more as a way of knowing.  Just as present science is one means of knowing about the world, so too theology is a means of knowing, and therefore a "science" in the etymological understanding of it. But do go and enjoy--it is a remarkable imitation of St. Thomas Aquinas, and a fitting tribute.

Living Out the Gospels: The Music of Glenn Gould This was brought to my attention by a friend, and while I cannot endorse the aesthetic theory or literary theory of anyone who so easily dismisses Proust from the Canon, there are some interesting points.  While much of the theory seems to derive from John Gardner's notion of moral fiction and much depends on how one thinks about "great writers," I do find some of her critiques on target.  Comparing Franzen to Tolstoy, for example, is a ludicrous over-reaching.  Indeed, the same could be said of comparing much of modern literature to older literature.  There is something flaccid, unhealthy, rather daliesque and dripping-clocks about much of modern literature.  I will emphatically deny, though, that such thought applies to the magnificent mind and approach of Marcel Proust.

The Canon, or not?

Poetry Out Loud examined. via Books Inq. The best multicultural education one can get is a grounding in the classics of one's own culture--the ability to understand how literature works at a base level in a vernacular that is comprehensible to the individual.  This was my training--and though I am occasionally mystified by my forays into other cultures, I can claim that I'm occasionally mystified by my forays into my own--it is all equal.  While much should be done to redress the historic discrimination that has kept out of our hands works of quality by women and minorities--it seems a shame to make that one of the overriding criteria for a selection of work.