Category: Literary Matters
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Bukowski and Others on Writing
Includes a mess o' good links. Buk is trash, especially his novels, but in a load of rubbish you may sometimes find a gem. Bluebird is a pretty good poem.
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Dr. Johnson versus Kerouac
Patrick Kurp makes the case against spontaneous bop prosody. And a strong case it is. The Rolling Stones sang that it's only Rock and Roll, but I like it. I'd say something similar about Sweet Gone Jack's hyper-romantic effusions. It's only rush and gush, flow and go, but I like it, like it, yes I…
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Jack Kerouac Went Home in October
Jack Kerouac quit the mortal coil 50 years ago today, October 21st, securing his release from the samsaric wheel of the quivering meat conception, and the granting of his wish: The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe…
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Was Sisyphus a Bachelor?
Franz Kafka ruminates in this 1922 diary entry on the problem of procreation and dreams of a bourgeois rootedness that probably would have suffocated him: The infinite, deep, warm, saving happiness of sitting beside the cradle of one’s child opposite its mother. There is also in it something of this feeling: matters no longer rest with…
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Roger Kimball on Elias Canetti on Death
An excerpt from Roger Kimball, Becoming Elias Canetti: . . . . Canetti’s response to the fact of death—“the only fact,” as he sometimes puts it—is a tragic stance of rebellion against an ineluctable fate. The overriding question for every individual, he writes in The Torch in My Ear, is “whether he should put up…
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The Notebook and its Ideal Entry, the Aphorism
Susan Sontag on Elias Canetti: 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 roughness, but its ideal entry is the aphorism. Most of Canetti’s entries take up the…
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It Used to be Hard to be a Good Catholic
John Fante, Full of Life, HarperCollins 2002, pp. 86-87. Originally published in 1952. I liked an atheistic wife. Her position made matters easy for me. It simplified a planned family. We had no scruples about contraceptives. Ours had been a civil marriage. We were not chained by religious tenets. Divorce was there, any time we…
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Review of Mary Gordon, On Thomas Merton
The review is by Gary WILLS, not Willis. It is well worth reading. But, as someone who has read all seven volumes of Merton's Journals, I find this unfair: In 1965, to keep him [Merton] on the vast grounds of the abbey, the abbot approved a state of virtual secession within the monastery. Merton could…
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D. G. Myers on Kurt Vonnegut
I admit to never having read any Kurt Vonnegut. But I have just read a gushing article in The Atlantic about his Slaughterhouse-Five, now 50 years old. So I thought I'd see what D. G. Myers has to say about Vonnegut. Some excerpts from No on Vonnegut: The Library of America has made the weird…
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A Commonplace Blog
A Commonplace Blog is the best literary weblog that I am aware of. It is defunct, its proprietor and sole contributor, D. G. Myers, having died in September, 2014. I believe I first came upon it via Patrick Kurp's excellent Anecdotal Evidence. Now while the literary knowledge and literary sensibility of this metaphysician and logic-chopper…
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JUST OVER THE TRANSOM: THE SELECTED WORKS OF CESARE PAVESE
Whatever you say about Jeff Bezos & Co., Amazon's service is amazonianly amazing. I order a book. They promise delivery in two days. It arrives the next day. Would that happen in a socialist shit hole, Bernie? Could a company such as Amazon even get off the ground in such a politically feculent locale as…
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On Sentence Fragments
I was taught to avoid them. The teaching was sound. But rules of style admit of exceptions. That too is a rule of sorts. My rule anent sentence fragments hitherto has been that they are to be deployed, if deployed at all, sparingly. That's what I taught my students. Does my rule admit of exceptions? …
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To Write Well, Read Well
To write well, read well. Read good books, which are often, but not always, old books. If you carefully read, say, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, you will learn something of the expository potential of the English language from a master of thought and expression. If time is short, study one of his popular essays…
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Hemingway on Wolfe
Is Line Editing a Lost Art? Excerpt: Manuscripts, and spirits, are often saved by line editors. Ernest Hemingway began an October 1949 letter to Charles Scribner already in a mood: “The hell with writing today.” Then he opines about editor Maxwell Perkins and the novelist Thomas Wolfe: “If Max hadn’t cut ten tons of shit…