If you don’t give literature a decisive part to play in your existence, then you haven’t got anything but a show of culture.
If you don’t give literature a decisive part to play in your existence, then you haven’t got anything but a show of culture.
Saul Bellow
Dreams
About
The Trail
Thursday, November 15th, 2018
Sunday, June 17th, 2018
Michael Chabon on Finnegan’s Wake [2012].
As my year of diving languorously into the murky waters of the Wake wore on, I came to feel that it was this failure, this impossibility, this grand futility of the Wake, that constituted its secret theme, its true aboutness.
Thursday, July 1st, 2010
How Pleasure Works
Once upon a time, the thought that I could have written this book myself made me think it was a good book. Now it makes me think it’s not worth reading. Enjoyable through most of it, in retrospect it seems a rather junky collection of anecdotes that the author enjoyed from his own favorites, Freakonomics style. The references to Darwin and Leon Kass, I don’t know, it feels sullied now.
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
The Beginning of Wisdom
The book of the Book. I am biased but there is just so much here, and the good doctor is such graciously juicy writerly company. I especially like the Babel treatment.
Rambles
Curs to Fate
Yesterday I lost Jam in Villa Borghese, the central park here in Rome, some five miles from Talenti, the neighborhood where we’re staying. She has not turned up since.
Mind the Dream
Dreaming about our passed companions as if they are alive requires tricks to the dreaming mind to overcome what it believes and knows to be true.