Category: World Literature

Reading Jewish

In 1994, I purchased Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, and would peruse it from time to time, and pick a book off of Bloom’s four lists.    He got me back to Shakespeare  and sparked…

Andrew & Joan

Andrew Ivers continues to guide me when it comes to the delights of the Western Canon. Last week I asked him where I should start with Joan Didion and without hesitation he suggested Slouching towards…

Long Live Peretz!

Today we must take the most important thing that [Peretz] possess and that shines through in all his works, in all their times: his love for Jew and man. Also his universalism and humanism, his…

Appreciating Jack Appreciating

Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters: 1940-1956, v. 1 As I’m convinced of the the utility of “pulling”* from my reading, I found the following gems in some of Kerouac’s letters up till  he had to deal…

Harvard Joke about Jesus

“A fine teacher, but didn’t publish.” –Quoted by George Steiner, in Lessons of the Masters, p. 33. Steiner observes, “A cardinal definition of genius points, I believe, to the capacity to originate myths, to devise…

Present Minute, Only Minute

My grandmother in her old age Sold barley and groats at a stall In the market place. She did not measure her cereal More carefully Than I must minutes. — The Poems Of Charles Reznikoff:…

The Outgoingness of the Heart

In no Chinese poet’s works does compassion for human suffering play so large a part. The works of his maturity — the ballads, satires and petitions- — are largely grounded on pity, and even at…

Intellectual Superiority Complex

Ivan Karamazov has lost his faith precisely because he has elevated himself above the people. In this case, “the people” are not necessarily peasants, but are what Ivan, a modern intellectual, is not: human beings…

One Kind Gesture

I am grateful to Gary Saul Morson, for his book that has engaged me over the last year, Wisdom Confronts Certainty, as well as many of his articles and essays. Thanks to Morson’s insights here…