Monthly Archives: July 2015
Art as Production for Use Turned into Art as Production for Profit…
The art world can’t help but be pleased with the efforts of its victims — there’s money to be made, after all. But there are those of us who watch these developments with increasing alarm, wondering if the art world … Continue reading
Walker Percy, The South, Gentlemen, God…and Me….
Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course…. … Continue reading
Literature as Comfort Food…
Our choices of favorite books, those we go to time and again for pleasure, for solace, for inspiration, for – comfort – may be inexplicable, even to us…. As I continue my rather too leisurely reading of Walker Percy’s classic … Continue reading
A Question of What Matters: Hyperrealism and the Literature of Detachment….
Complete detachment or complete engagement – as Billy Joel observed, it all depends upon your appetite…. I am still making my way, rather too leisurely probably, through Walker Percy’s marvelous novel The Last Gentleman (about which I will have much … Continue reading
Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman: Mythbusting or Manipulation?
The soon to be released Harper Lee novel Go Set a Watchman will be an interesting experiment: a sequel that seeks to explode the mythology surrounding her only other work, the ubiquitously revered celebration of high-minded Southernness, To Kill a Mockingbird. How … Continue reading
Fool: Christopher Moore’s Shakespeare Mashup Diverts…and That Alone…
Reading Christopher Moore’s Fool is rather like watching Hercules: the Legendary Journeys or or Xena: Warrior Princess; that willing suspension of disbelief Coleridge was on about is absolutely necessary. A veer away from the 2015 reading list for a book … Continue reading
Carson McCullers: Trying to Understand Why Love is so Difficult…
In The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and in her short stories Carson McCullers seeks again and again after the same goal: to discover why love is so difficult to find and even more difficult to keep…. Carson McCullers’ literary … Continue reading
Peter Handke: The Truth About Sorrow…
What makes Handke exceptional is his willingness to engage us as well as himself in the difficulty of telling our truths, sharing our sorrows, interpreting our dreams…. For the last (well, perhaps next to last) work from the “world literature” … Continue reading
