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Unmasking our Self-Deception about Self-Improvement
In reviewing the incongruous medley of Dan Brown‘s Inferno and two new translations of Dante‘s classic (by Clive James and Mary Jo Bang), Robert Pogue Harrison writes: Much of the fascination of the...
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The Laziness of Reductionist Analyses
In his review of David Luke‘s translation of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Other Stories W. H. Auden wrote, Polar opposites as in appearance they look, the two literary doctrines of Naturalism and...
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The Coven’s Vision of Hell and ‘Repetition Compulsion’
American Horror Story‘s third season, The Coven, ended last night. The show as a whole did not quite meet my expectations–a critique echoed here and here; but still, for various reasons, I quite...
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Social Media From Beyond the Grave
Charles Simic describes an ingenious and profitable aspiration for immortality: [The] poet Mark Strand…told me excitedly one day that he had invented a new kind of gravestone that….would include…a slot...
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Aristophanes’ Sausage-Seller and the Tea Partier
I have just finished writing a draft review of Lee Fang‘s The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right (New York: The New Press, 2013); it will appear shortly in The Washington Spectator. As I...
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Reflections on Translations-VII: Capturing Class Distinctions
In yesterday’s post, in an attempt to analogize Tea Partiers with demagogues, I included an excerpt from Aristophanes‘ The Knights. Once I had posted a link to the post on Facebook, I made the...
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Jacob Bronowski on the Missing Shakespeare of the Bushmen
Jacob Bronowski–who so entertained and edified many of us with The Ascent of Man–was very often a wise man but he was also Eurocentric, a weakness that produced astonishingly reductive views about the...
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‘The Spring is The Autumn’
In ‘Henriette Wyeth: Scenes from a painter’s life’ (from A Certain Climate, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 1988, pp. 164) Paul Horgan makes note of, and subsequently quotes Wyeth on, the...
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William H. Gass On The Dialectical Nature Of Love
In Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translations (Perseus Books, New York, 1999, pp. 13) William H. Gass writes: During childhood, contradiction paves every avenue of feeling, and we grow...
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Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Mountains Of The Mind
A few years ago, while visiting my brother in India, I browsed through his collection of mountaineering books (some of them purchased by me in the US and sent over to him.) In Robert MacFarlane‘s...
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The Most Valuable Philosophical Lesson Of All
I’m often asked–by non-academics, natch–if anything in my philosophical education has been of value to me in the conduct of my lived life. I have found this question hard to answer in the terms my...
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F. O. Matthiessen On ‘The Value Of The Tragic Writer’
In The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (Oxford University Press, New York, p. 107), F. O. Matthiessen writes: The value of the tragic writer has always lain in the uncompromising honesty with which he has...
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John Forbes’‘Love Poem’: War As Entertaining, Compensatory, Lullaby
Reading Kath Kenny‘s wonderful essay on the Australian poet John Forbes–a personal and literary take on his life and work–reminded me that because I was introduced to Forbes’ poetry by his close...
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Goethe On The ‘Inexhaustible’ Poet
In Marx’s Concept of Man, Erich Fromm credits Goethe as having “developed the idea of man’s productivity into a central point of his philosophical thinking….all decaying cultures are characterized by...
View ArticleThe Indifferent ‘Pain Of The World’
In All the Pretty Horses (Vintage International, New York, 1993, pp. 256-257), Cormac McCarthy writes: He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth...
View ArticleThe Self As Prison
In his review of Charles Simic‘s The Lunatic: Poems and The Life of Images: Selected Prose Phillip Lopate makes note of Simic’s “cultivation of awe,” his “opening himself to chance, that favorite...
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