Category: creative-process
- Hammerin’ HenryThe Master by Colm Toibin. Scribner. 338 pp. $14.00. I bought this book because I saw it in a used bookstore where I had a lot of credit, so it was free. Some months back I started and couldn’t get into it. But my reading buddy Sally Sexton recommended it highly, along with Toibin’s Brooklyn—so I ...Read more
- Free to Be MeFreedom by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar Straus Giroux. 562 pp. $28.00 Jonathan Franzen is the novelist I always wanted to be. Like The Corrections, Freedom essentially dissects one dysfunctional family, really just four people—maybe five or six, if you include important friends—and does so at exhaustive length, yet never seems dull, or overly long. Franzen sees so ...Read more
- Fearful SymmetryBlake by Peter Ackroyd. Knopf. 399 pp. My re-kindled interest in Blake began, weirdly enough, when I ordered some copies of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior for some inmates and noticed that the most perceptive Amazon review was written by a woman named Laurie from New Zealand. I clicked to see the rest of ...Read more
- Zazen is a Physical PracticeDon’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master By Brad Warner. New World Library. 306 pp. $16.95. Still pondering Brad Warner’s book. Dogen goes on and on. Brad does a paraphrase of the Fukanzazengi, the meditation instructions Dogen wrote (and largely cribbed from a Chinese document) when he returned to Japan ...Read more
- Stop Me Before I See More Movies!Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2016 Thursday The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith *** Forever, Chinatown **1/2 The 100 Years Show **** The Many Sad Faces of Mr. Toledano **** By Sydney Lumet ***1/2 Weiner **1/2 Friday The Black Belt *** Trapped **** Dancing for You ***** Dixieland ** Tarikat ***** Horizons **** Two Trains Runnin’ **** Saturday Following Seas ***** Life, Animated **** Raising Bertie ** Hours spent standing in line, sometimes ...Read more
- The Texture of Every DayJim Harrison 1937-2016 I’ve been haunted this week by the death of Jim Harrison, whom I’ve described for years as my favorite living writer and whose books I bought as soon as they came out, without reading a review or glancing through them. Only once did he let me down. I’ve wondered specifically if The Ancient ...Read more
- True FilthOld Filth by Jane Gardam. Europa Editions. 290 pp. $15.00. I wish I could put into words what is so great about Old Filth, which I impulsively bought because I’d read a brief review somewhere. (That provocative second word in the title is an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong.) The style is impeccable, ...Read more
- Old Warbler Hitting Some False NotesThe Ancient Minstrel by Jim Harrison. Grove Press. 255 pp. $25.00 I’d like to say I’m Jim Harrison’s greatest fan, though there’s a lot of competition for that spot. I began reading him back in the eighties when my fellow clerks at the local bookstore raved about him. I started with Sundog and went through the ...Read more
- She Wasn’t Just a Dotty Old LadyIris Murdoch As I Knew Her by A.N. Wilson. Arrow Books. 276 pp. Those Brits do keep writing, don’t they? I look at the titles by A. N. Wilson, who is my rough contemporary (two years younger than I, actually) and I’m astonished, and somewhat ashamed, to see thirty books. (Compared to six for me. Eight ...Read more
- Life Is Grand IV (Then You Have a Lonely Old Age and Die. If You’re Lucky)The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante. The Fourth and Final Neapolitan Novel. Europa Editions. 473 pp. $18.00. “I’d have to say it was my least favorite of the four.” I was startled when a friend of mine spoke those words, when I told her I was in the middle of the fourth of Elena ...Read more
- Life Is Grand III (You Slept with my Husband You Whore I’ll Smash Your Face In)Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Book III, the Neapolitan Novels, Middle Time by Elena Ferrante. Europa Editions. 418 pp. $18.00. In some ways this is the most aptly titled of the three novels I’ve read in Ferrante’s brilliant quartet. Really there is only one person who has left, at least semi-permanently, and that is ...Read more
- You Didn’t Know You Had It Until It Was GoneYouth A Film by Paolo Sorrentino “Two seniors for youth.” It was a funny remark that I didn’t realize I was making until I said it. But then, apparently, it was adopted all the way down the ticket line. If that Saturday afternoon showing in Asheville was any indication, the people who are seeing this movie ...Read more
- Life Is Grand II (Touch My Wife and So Help Me God I’ll Slit Your Throat)The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante. Book Two of the Neapolitan Novels. Europa Editions. 471 pp. $18.00. I thought when I began the Elena Ferrante novels that I would read one volume, read a couple of other books, then come back and read another. I figured I’d eventually read all four. But each ...Read more
- The True Art Is Your LifeDharma Art by Chogyam Trungpa. The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa Volume Seven. pp. 3-162. Shamblala. 2004. Zen and Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life by John Daido Loori. Ballantine Books. 248 pp. $25.95. I look back with great fondness on the days when I wrote my first novel. It was 1973, and I had just turned 25. ...Read more
- Save Me a Spot in the CabooseMystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘N’ Roll Music by Greil Marcus. A Plume Book. 424 pp. $17.00 I read this book because Dwight Garner—my favorite reviewer at the New York Times—named it as the book he’d most like to read again for the first time. Greil Marcus is a rough contemporary of mine, just ...Read more
- Dispatches from the Abyss IVFinal Reflections on Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Back Bay Books. 1079 pp. $18.00. I don’t know how I expected this novel to end, some massive climax where Wallace tied up loose ends and brought it to a satisfactory conclusion, but of course I got no such thing. It ends in an orgy of addictive ...Read more
- Dispatches from the Abyss IIHalfway through Infinite Jest I’m beginning to think I understand the title, which hasn’t appeared in the first 500 pages of text. But in addition to text, this novel has footnotes (footnotes! In a novel?), or more accurately endnotes, in an even smaller font than the already small font of the text; in addition to 981 ...Read more
- Dispatches from the Abyss IReading Infinite Jest Despite my admiration for David Foster Wallace as a writer, I figured I would never read Infinite Jest. I’d read collections of his stories and essays, and didn’t think I could take his intensity at such length (1079 pp. in my paperback). I’m a ploddingly slow reader, and figured a book like that ...Read more
- Granny’s a BitchGrandma. A film by Paul Weitz Elle (Lily Tomlin), the title character of Grandma, is almost unbelievably grouchy. Within the first twenty minutes of the movie she has broken up with what seems to be a perfectly nice and quite lovely girlfriend (Judy Greer), made a spectacle of herself in a local coffee shop and purposely ...Read more
- The Burning BuildingThe End of the Tour A film by James Ponsoldt I’ve always felt two ways about David Foster Wallace. Like Jonathan Lethem—whom I’ve been reading lately—he’s a major writer from a generation younger than mine. A few years ago I met a young writer who was wildly enthusiastic about Wallace, so I read a couple of ...Read more
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Unfinished LivesAmerican OriginalLosing ItKeep an Eye on IgorAnd Is He Pissed
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (121)American literature (215)art (113)Buddhism (169)Christianity (125)creative process (246)death and dying (139)meditation (123)movies (160)music (36)race (105)religion (187)sex (170)spirituality (170)the art of narrative (252)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)