Take Charge
Mr. Elphinston talked of a new book that was much admired, and asked Dr. Johnson if he had read it. JOHNSON: “I have looked into it.” “What (said Elphinston) have you not read it through?” …
Category: Reading
While Browsing The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English, I Came across This Entry…
Joyce, James (Augustine, Aloysius) (1882-1941) … Upon graduating in 1902, Joyce left for Paris where he lived in poverty, ostensibly studying medicine, actually reading his way through the literature section of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
Bodhisattva/Neurotic
Allen wanted to see everything, do everything, and meet everyone. 267 Bill Morgan, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg Recently, I have read biographies of Goethe and Proust. Today I finished…
Apt Epigraph for Celia Farber’s Superb Book, “Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS”
“But power and greed and corruptible seedSeem to be all that there is” –Bob Dylan, Blind Willie McTell
One Reader May Suffice
Any author, [Marcel] Proust wrote Jaloux, should be happy to “write for a single, exquisite reader like you,” and he added a Proustian analogy comparing Jaloux’s contact with his book to pollen intended for “a…
A Healing Pleasure
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or…
Which Would You Choose?!
I receive frequent emails from Tablet, including the late afternoon What Happened Today: Scroll. Here is today’s Idea of the Day—
Problematizing My Faves: A Conservative Remembers Allen Ginsberg
Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer In a recent post, I acknowledged finally paying closer attention to the second precept of Thich…
With Gratitude for Harold Bloom
In 1994 I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon after I had taken a leave of absence from my doctoral program in Religion and Society at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Bloom offered…