Category: Literary Matters
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The Dialogue Form
Scott Johnson, Learning from Euthydemus: The dialogue form is conducive to venturing otherwise forbidden thoughts in a time of persecution. The form might usefully be employed to address the shibboleths shoved down the throats of students like Euthydemus in our own day. Let us have our best teachers turn to the dialogue form with students…
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From Hagiography to Pathography: Yates and Kerouac
I'll admit to being more fascinated by Richard Yates' life as reported in the 671 pages of Blake Bailey's biography than in Yates' writing. So this struck a nerve: I’m no fan of hagiographers, obviously, but I’m only a bit less distrustful of literary biographers. Too often their books slide toward what Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed…
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Two-Fisted Self-Pity: Anatole Broyard’s Review of Richard Yates, YOUNG HEARTS CRYING
In what follows I correct the digitized version of Broyard's review which first appeared in The New York Times on 28 October 1984. Yates' novel appeared in the same year. Blake Bailey masterfully recounts the book's reception in A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Picador 2003), pp. 529-541, with special attention…
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Some Very Good Masters
Come May, I will have been on a Richard Yates jag for a year. What follows is my correction of the digitized version of Yates' essay "Some Very Good Masters" which first appeared in The New York Times on 19 April 1981. Yates explains what he learned about writing from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great…
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Kent Haruf
I caught a glimpse of an intriguing title the other day, "Our Souls at Night." What a great title, I thought. So I picked up the novel whose title it is, by an author I had never heard of, and began to read. I was not impressed at first, but put off by the spare…
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Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats
Still 'jacking off' in December? Well, when I find something relevant I snag it for my files. The bit about Jack's saintly & sickly older brother Gerard in this chapter of a book by Barry Miles caught my eye re: my response to Vito C. , so here it is, below the fold.
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Jack Kerouac: Religious Writer?
Beatific October, Kerouac month hereabouts, is at its sad redbrick end once again, but I can't let her slip away without one more substantial Kerouac entry. So raise your glass with me on this eve of All Saint's Day as I say a prayer for Jack's soul which, I fear, is still in need of…
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Faith Animated by Doubt
A living faith is animated by doubt. Faith dies when it hardens into a subjective certainty and a moribund complacency. I have had this thought for years. Each time I re-enact it, it strikes me as true. I was pleased to discover recently that T. S. Eliot holds the same or a very similar view:…
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A Lit-Crit Fest
At My Facebook page. I posed the question whether JOHN BARTH is worth reading. 29 comments and counting.
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Kerouac No Role Model
Lest I lead astray any young and impressionable readers, I am duty-bound to point out that my annual October focus on Kerouac is by no means to be taken as an endorsement of him as someone to be imitated. Far from it! He failed utterly to live up to the Christian precepts that he learned…
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Kerouac’s Beat(ific) Visions and the Cross
A good essay by Joshua Hren at First Things. What Hren says is complemented by this entry of mine from 31 October 2010: The despairing section X of Book Thirteen of Vanity of Duluoz which I quoted yesterday is followed immediately by this: Yet I saw the cross just then when I closed my eyes after writing all this. …
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Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac
If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in. Herein lies the best argument for continence. The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he is more destructive of the spirit. You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying that there…
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BEATific October Again
It's October again, my favorite month, and Kerouac month in my personal literary liturgy. And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack' reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960. Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment. I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. I…
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For the Kerouac File
Black Like Kerouac I was awfully naïve once, but never so naïve as Kerouac/Paradise, who understands so little about the lives of black Americans that he wishes he “were a Negro [because] the best the white world could offer was not enough ecstasy, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.” It is…
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On the Fear of Death
Heute roth, morgen todt. I woke up from a dream an hour ago. I was staying with Philip Roth in his New York City apartment where I noticed that my beard had been shaved off. I said to myself, "You look good even without it." The vanity was cover for the fear that I am…