Dear Annie and Lindsay
I was earlier going through a 2016-17 Moleskine commonplace book I kept, and came across the following passages I transcribed from Harold Bloom’s book, How to Read and Why. I hope you may enjoy at…
Tag: Thomas Mann
Amongst My Books
“… at least resolve, while you remain in any settled residence, to spend a certain number of hours every day amongst your books…”—Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, in Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson “Amongst” could…
A Jewish Vocation
This week I finished Marcel Reich-Ranicki‘s autobiography, The Author of Himself. He was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and the foremost literary critic in post-war Germany. As I read him, I thought of my…
On Susan Sontag, Trip to Hanoi
Journal, July 2005 Susan Sontag spent two weeks in North Vietnam in 1968, and wrote 90 pages about her experiences. (Perhaps I will cull from those notebooks I kept in Gaza and the West Bank…