Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Literary Matters

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs from a Passage in Thomas McGuane

    Here is a passage from Thomas McGuane, Nothing but Blue Skies, Houghton-Mifflin, 1992, pp. 201-202, to which I have added hyperlinks. He [Frank Copenhaver] turned on the radio and listened to an old song called "Big John": everybody falls down a mine shaft; nobody can get them out because of something too big to pry; Big John…

  • Alliteration

    A reader who likes my alliteration found this specimen in a post from 2010: The sobriety of solitary silence is superior to the sloughing off of self into the social . . . . Perhaps I overdo it. An argument against alliterative excess is that it could distract the reader from the content.   A good…

  • On the Fear of Death

    A Substack meditation occasioned by Philip Roth's Everyman.  

  • It Used to be Hard to be a Good Catholic

    Substack latest. Another taste of John Fante with a bit of commentary. Tony Flood comments, "A priest is now authorized to bless the fornicating couple who recently befouled a Senate hearing room." 

  • The Day Bukowski Discovered John Fante

    Stack leader.

  • Hitchens, Death, and Literary Immortality

    Substack latest. Excerpt: To the clearheaded, however, literary immortality is little more than a joke, and itself an illusion. Only a few read Hitch now, and soon enough he will be unread, his books remaindered, put into storage, forgotten. This is a fate that awaits all scribblers but a tiny few. And even they will…

  • A Commonplace Blog

    D. G. Myers remembered. Top o' the Stack.

  • Ayn Rand on C. S. Lewis; Flannery O’Connor on Ayn Rand

    Here, via Victor Reppert, who cleverly speaks of Rand's  "Jack-hammering": Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-meta­physical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.)…

  • Susan Sontag on Elias Canetti

    From Granta, 1 March 1982. This passage in particular resonated with me.  It reads well with 'weblog' substituted for 'notebook.' The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is ‘everything’. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and…

  • Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism

    Top o' the Stack

  • Oriana Fallaci on Writing

    From The Rage and the Pride (New York: Rizzoli, 2003), pp. 23-24, emphases added: I must say that writing is a very serious matter for me: it is not an amusement or an outlet or a relief. It is not, because I never forget that written words can do a lot of good but also a lot of…

  • Isn’t It Morally Sick to Enjoy Killing?

    The above reads like the sophistry of a morally sick old man, full of himself, a drunkard, who blew his brains out at the age of 60, a man who kept a list of the men he killed and the women he 'had.'

  • Eugene O’Neill

    A tortured soul if ever there was one. A  soul in torment lacking the sense to know that saucing the mix with John Barleycorn is like pouring gasoline on a fire barely contained but eager to engulf house and home, wife and child. Dowling's biography's another pathography. Well-spent a scholarly life digging through dirty laundry?…

  • Paul Brunton on Eugene O’Neill

    The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, vol. 7, Healing of the Self, p. 50: The need to take care of the nature of our thoughts was illustrated by the life-story of Eugene O'Neill. The gloomy themes of his plays, the gaunt tragedy and overhanging doom with which he deliberately permeated them, brought him down in his…

  • William Faulkner on Privacy

    Harper's Magazine, 1955.