Monthly Archives: July 2015

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →