Originating in answer to one of those Facebook memes that go the rounds, I'm going to write commentaries on "15 albums that left a major impression," in chronological order of my getting to know them.

These 15 are not only fully absorbed, they are touchstones, lodestar albums I steer my… Read full post »

10. The Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke (German; 1923; trans. A. Poulin, Jr., 1977)

It was May of 1978 and I’d never heard of Rilke but for references to him in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow where he is the favorite reading of…

Read full post »

The years of the past decade are not notable to me as being distinct entities, much less so than decades from earlier in my own history.  In fact, during the decade itself, I could be heard to say I’ll start paying attention again when we get to… Read full post »

9. Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon (American, 1973)

An English teacher in my high school, who later became a friend and was known for being something of ‘a freak,’ hearing I’d read a bunch of Vonnegut and had recently made it halfway through Ulysses, told me about a crazy/…

Read full post »

Yes, it's true, Bob Dylan has a Christmas album; read my review here

It’s time to do the next book in my list of '15 Books That Stayed With You.'

8. Complete Works, by Arthur Rimbaud (French; trans. by Paul Schmidt, 1976)

Previous to Schmidt’s version, the only complete English Rimbaud, I believe, was Wallace Fowlie’s, which I had gotten from the libra… Read full post »

My review of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice is now up at Quarterly Conversation.

Continuing commentary on ‘15 Books That Made a Difference.'

7. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925, American)

As with Ulysses, Gatsby is another work destined to become a ‘modernist classic.’ Unlike Ulysses, Gatsby had the distinction of being one of the few novels assigne… Read full post »

Back in June, I started a post about '15 books that left a mark on me,' from earliest reading, and covered the first five. Here's a bit on the next biggie, which I happened to teach a class on this summer.  So, here's to from 'Stately, plump' to 'yes I will… Read full post »

The death of someone you grew up with is always surprising, and maybe at least a little cautionary. You know the Grim Reaper is eyeing your generation, and that may be cause for anxiety.  But when the person who died is a mega celebrity, there’s a certain satisfaction in reflecting that… Read full post »

On Facebook I got tagged with a task: list the 15 books you find to be the most memorable. Not necessarily ‘the best’ or ‘the greatest,’ but the books that stayed with you. The ones, as I understood it, that marked you, made you a certain kind of reader. For fb,… Read full post »

If you grew up in the Philly area like I did, you had the good fortune of living in proximity to some great Cézannes -- in the collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at the Barnes Foundation, in NYC at the Met and MoMA, in DC at the National Gallery… Read full post »

Facebook abounds in quizzes. I haven’t yet taken tests to determine which philosopher or movie hero or pop diva I am, nor what city, ethnic food, or personality type. And no one has tagged me to reveal 25 things about myself. But I’m an inveterate list-maker and when I saw this… Read full post »

Together Through Life, Bob Dylan’s third album of the 21st century, was released on Tuesday. I’ve been listening to it pretty regularly because, though it didn’t seem like the kind of thing I most wanted to hear when I first heard it Tues-Wed, it has come to dominate the mood in/…

Read full post »

'April, come she will,' the old nursery rhyme says, and who can forget the wistful rendition by Simon and Garfunkel on the soundtrack to The Graduate (1967)? The month, so famously called 'the cruellest,' has been wet, at times windy, at times humid, occasionally halcyon, and finally downright summer… Read full post »

I happened to be reading Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee's excellent and bracing and clarifying novel Diary of a Bad Year (2007) just as news stories began to arrive about the 'torture memos.' What struck me so forcefully about Coetzee’s novel, in which a writer produces a series of 'opinions'… Read full post »

1. 'Vacate the personae.'

Having made it finally through Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975), I breathe an immense sigh of relief. The book was almost as exhausting as The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and that’s saying something. Bellow is the kind of writer, I now know for sur/…

Read full post »

2. The Obsolete Humanist

What I retained of Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) from my first reading -- about twenty-three and reading while on night duty as security at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts -- were the scenes of Moses Herzog -- a fiftysomething recently divorced father and profess/…

Read full post »

'Of course the company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 - now reckoned to be the world's most powerful brand - does not offer any substitute for the originators of content nor does it allow this to touch its corporate conscience. That is probably because one detects in… Read full post »

'How did he do it, how did he become Stanley Kubrick?' I found myself wondering that last Friday night as I watched The Killing (1956), a film directed by Kubrick early in his career, screened as part of a mini retrospect at Yale’s Cinema at the Whitney, to honor the… Read full post »

Whether or not this is for real, I saw the call and read a few haikus, so here goes mine:

 

My gonads after

We have climax'd together

Peach pits in syrup.

 

Th-th-th-th-that's all, folks!

  Read full post »

1. I Was a Teen-aged Steppenwolf!

Recently I re-read two novels to revisit certain mental territory, namely the place in my mind where I stored impressions from my earlier readings. This is one of the big attractions of re-reading after time has passed. No one, of course, has done more to extract… Read full post »

Friday I visited an exhibition at the Met: "Pierre Bonnard: The Late Interiors." The exhibit features luminous canvases painted from 1923 to 1947 that provide ample evidence for a reading of Bonnard as a great modernist, a relentless experimenter with color and form. In sharing those interests with t… Read full post »

There's been more talk about the humanities again recently, this time in a NYTimes article called 'In Tough Times, The Humanities Must Justify Their Worth,' fueled by a book by Anthony T. Kronman, a law professor at Yale, called Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the… Read full post »

In his online site, Think Again, Stanley Fish has posted several columns on the humanities -- 'Will the Humanities Save Us?,' 'The Uses of the Humanities, Part Two,' 'The Last Professor' -- asserting, a) the humanities, as academic disciplines, serve no purpose beyond themselves, b) the funding of th… Read full post »