Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Literary Matters

  • Ciardi on Kerouac: The Ultimate Literary Put-Down?

    A few years back the indefatigable Douglas Brinkley  edited and introduced the 1947-1954 journals of Jack Kerouac and put them before us  as Windblown World (Viking, 2004). Reading Windblown World reminded me of John Ciardi's "Epitaph for the Dead Beats" (Saturday Review, February 6, 1960), an excellent if unsympathetic piece of culture critique which I…

  • Good Advice from John Ciardi

    Poet John Ciardi (pronounced Chyar-dee, emphasis on first syllable, not See-ar-dee) was born in 1916 and died in 1986. A brilliant line of his sticks with me, though I cannot recall where he said it, and Mr. Google didn't help: "Never send a poem on a prose errand." Tattoo that onto your forearms, you would-be poets.…

  • John Heidenry’s Zero at the Bone

    There is serious reading and there is bed reading.  Serious reading is for stretching the mind and improving the soul.  It cannot be well done in bed but requires the alertness and seriousness provide by desk, hard chair, note-taking and coffee-drinking.  It is a pleasure, but one stiffened with an alloy of discipline.  Bed reading, however,…

  • From the Journal of a Discarded Man

    I love reading journals, both of the famous and of the obscure. Among the latter, I find my own especially intriguing for some reason. Here is an excerpt from Journal of a Discarded Man by one Walter Morris. He was in his mid-fifties at the time of this entry and has recently lost his job:…

  • Walter Morris on Solitude

    Walter Morris is an exceedingly obscure author whom the Maverick Philosopher has decided to take under his wing and rescue from total oblivion. When I get through with him at least some excerpts from his journals will be in range of the search engines. Please contact me if you know anything about this fellow. He…

  • Fiction and Philosophy: Does Fiction Do it Better?

    John Gardner, On Writers and Writing, p. 225: . . . at their best, both fiction and philosophy do the same thing, only fiction does it better — though slower. Philosophy by essence is abstract, a sequence of general argument controlled in its profluence by either logic (in old-fashioned systematic philosophy) or emotional coherence (in…

  • Philosophy, Fiction, and Bullshit

    In On Becoming a Novelist (Harper & Row, 1983), John Gardner raises the question of what the aspiring writer should study if he goes to college: A good program of courses in philosophy, along with creative writing, can clarify the writer's sense of what questions are important . . . . There are obvious dangers.…

  • Theodor Haecker on Literary Style and a Comparison with Karl Kraus

    Theodor Haecker, Tag- und Nachtbücher, 1939-1945, hrsg. Hinrich Siefken, Innsbruck: Haymon-Verlag, 1989, S. 212: Der persönliche und gute Stil eines Schriftstellers ist die — oft durch große Kunst erreichte — natürliche Einheit zweier Naturen — der Natur des Schriftstellers und der Natur der jeweiligen Sprache, in der er schreibt, denn diese beiden Naturen sind nicht…

  • Sweet Gone Jack Forty Years Down the Road

    Jack Kerouac was a big ball of affects ever threatening to dissolve in that sovereign soul-solvent, alcohol. One day he did, and died.  The date was 21 October 1969. Today is the 40th anniversary of his release from the wheel of the quivering meat conception and the granting of his wish: The wheel of the…

  • How Can You Be Clever in a Meatgrinder?

     It's October again, my favorite month, and Kerouac month in my personal literary liturgy.  Here is Kerouac on the road, not in a '49 Hudson with Neal Cassady, but in a bus  with his mother: Who are men that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What…

  • A Rare Find: The Anatomy of Bibliomania

    One of the pleasures of the bookish life is the 'find,' the occasion on which, whilst browsing through a well-stocked used book store, one lights upon a volume which one would never discover in a commercial emporium devoted to the purveyance of contemporary schlock. One day, after a leisurely lunch, I walked into a book…

  • Jack London, John Barleycorn, and the Noseless One

    Like many American boys, I read plenty of Jack London: The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea Wolf, Martin Eden, not to mention numerous short stories, some of them unforgettable to this day: "Love of Life," "Moonface," and "To Build a Fire." But I never got around to John Barleycorn until years later…

  • Are You a Natural-Born Scribbler? Take the Gide Test

    Here is an interesting passage from André Gide's last work, written shortly before his death in 1951, So Be It or The Chips Are Down, tr. Justin O'Brien, Alfred Knopf, 1959, pp. 145-146, bolding added, italics in original. Brief commentary follows. It is certain that the man who wonders as he takes up his pen:…