Category: death-and-dying
- Quotations from my Reading (cont.)From Septology by Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse, a Catholic convert. “it’s in the darkness that God lives, yes, God is darkness, and that darkness, God’s darkness, that nothingness, yes, it shines, yes, it’s from God’s darkness that the light comes, the invisible light . . . “I don’t understand why it’s at night, in the darkness, ...Read more
- Utopian RealistThe Heaven & Earth Grocery Store a novel by James McBride. Riverhead Books. 385 pp. ***** James McBride has written award-winning and bestselling novels in the past—The Good Lord Bird and Deacon King Kong—also a highly acclaimed memoir, The Color of Water, but The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store—is a different kind of book altogether, beyond ...Read more
- The Quick and the DeadIronweed a novel by William Kennedy. Penguin. 227 pp. $18.00 ***** Despite my huge admiration for the first two novels in the Albany cycle, I can see why Ironweed was the prize winner. Kennedy’s writing reaches an apotheosis in this book, perhaps from the subject matter, perhaps just because he was growing in confidence. In 1983, ...Read more
- True CharismaRobert Grandizio 1943-2023 I was on the first football team Robert Grandizio ever coached. I didn’t know him well, because he was the backfield coach and I was on the line. But he stood in marked contrast to our head coach, Anthony Botti, a small squat man who was emotional and mercurial, furious at any failure or ...Read more
- Human ConsciousnessMrs. Dalloway a novel by Virginia Woolf and The Hours a novel by Michael Cunningham. A Combined Edition. Picador. 417 pp. (more or less). $20.00. ***** I haven’t read much Virginia Woolf and don’t have any particular excuse. She was all the rage in the seventies and eighties, when her diaries and letters were coming out. ...Read more
- Cast a Cold Eye on Life, on DeathWhat I Don’t Know About Death by C.W. Huntington, Jr. Wisdom Publications. 167 pp. $16.95. ***** This is how suddenly it can happen: in January of 2020, C.W. Huntington seemed to be in perfect health. He and his wife had friends over to celebrate the new year, and after the celebration he doubled over with intestinal ...Read more
- Portrait of a MarriageHamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O’Farrell. Vintage. 305 pp. $16.95 ***** I was absolutely stunned by this novel. I’d read that it was about Shakespeare’s son Hamnet dying of the black plague (though no one knows how he died, and Shakespeare never mentioned the plague in all his writing), then a few years ...Read more
- Two People TalkingDrive My Car a film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. With Hidetosha Nishijima, Toko, Miura, Reika Kirishima, Park YuRim. Streaming on HBO Max. ***** Drive My Car is so fundamentally strange a movie that it’s hard to know how to talk about it. The full credits, for instance, don’t appear until forty minutes in. There are still two ...Read more
- Comedy as TragedyDon’t Look Up a film by Adam McKay. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett. ***** Don’t Look Up is a comic masterpiece, the Dr. Strangelove of our time. It holds a mirror up to this country and captures it exactly. You watch this movie and laugh until you cry. Then you just cry. ...Read more
- Faulkner at his Knottiest(The Faulkner Project) Go Down, Moses from Faulkner Novels 1942-1954 Library of America pp. 1-281 ***** I had an odd thought when I began this novel, the thirteenth in my survey of Faulkner’s work: This is the real Faulkner. It’s a strange thing to say about a man who had already written four or five masterpieces, ...Read more
- Man on the MoonRobert McCutcheon 1921-2021 The thing I will most remember about my Uncle Bob is the way he took care of my mother—his sister—when she had dementia. Her second husband, my stepfather, had died just before she turned 90, and it took some time for us to realize that he had been her memory in recent years ...Read more
- I Bow BackWhen You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen by Norman Fischer. Shambhala. 336 pp. $16.97. ***** I haven’t read all his books, but for my money this is Norman Fischer’s best, reflections on a wide range of topics from a man who has spent fifty years living and teaching the ...Read more
- Name Droppers ExtraordinaireInside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis. Knopf. 545 pp. $28.82 Country Girl: A Memoir by Edna O’Brien. Little, Brown. 368 pp. $27.94. Inside Story is a novel because Martin Amis chooses to call it one. It has novelistic sections, but the bulk of the book is a memoir of some writers who have been his good ...Read more
- She Doesn’t Give a Rat’s AssI Care a Lot a film by J Blakeson. With Rosamund Pike, Peter Dinklage, Eliza Gonzalez, Diane Wiest. Streaming on Netflix. ***** I Care a Lot—a comedy—is the most morally despicable movie I’ve seen in years. The female protagonists are the most hateful characters I can recall in a film. It includes stomach-churning violence, has any ...Read more
- Hem IIIHemingway | The Blank Page | 1944-1961 a film by Ken Burns and Kim Novick. Streaming on PBS **** The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918-1926 by Ernest Hemingway. Library of America. 850 pp. ***** There’s nothing about the writing or production values that makes this third episode of Hemingway not as good as the others, ...Read more
- Hem IIHemingway: The Avatar (1929-1944) A film by Ken Burns and Kim Novick. Available on PBS Streaming. ***** Once again, in this second episode, I was stuck by Hemingway’s youth (he was already calling himself Papa in 1929, at the age of thirty). By the end of this episode he’s just 45 years old, and he’s already ...Read more
- Portrait of a Lunatic (You Wrote About the Wrong Cousin, Iris Murdoch)The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch. Penguin Classics. 495 pp. $20.00 ***** The Sea, the Sea has everything going for it. It’s large and expansive, beautifully written; it contains a wealth of fascinating characters; it traces a wild plot, where things keep happening that you can’t believe, and it comes to an emotionally satisfying confusion. ...Read more
- Ode to SwimmingGet Back to Where You Once Belonged Yesterday I swam for the first time in over a year. Since 1985—that’s 35 years—I’d gone swimming at the Y three times a week. I’d been a jogger before that, but the North Carolina heat and my aching joints made me turn to swimming at the age of 37. I’d ...Read more
- Portrait of the Artists Through a Boozy HazeEarly Novels and Stories by James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country. Library of America. 970 pp. In the midst of the endless current theorizing about race and sexuality and gender identity, and talk of all the books we must read (I hate to be told I must read a book), ...Read more
- And Talk They DidLet Them All Talk a film by Steven Soderbergh. With Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest, Candice Bergen, Gemma Chan, Lucas Hedges. Available on HBO Plus. ***** At one point in Let Them All Talk, a movie about three old college friends who do a crossing on the Queen Mary 2, Susan (Dianne Wiest) stops an awkward conversation ...Read more
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All Shook UpWhat's in a Song? IIWriting for his LifeWhat’s in a Song?Mixed Feelings
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (127)American literature (226)art (123)Buddhism (171)Christianity (132)creative process (262)death and dying (144)meditation (125)movies (167)music (42)race (110)religion (196)sex (187)spirituality (174)the art of narrative (266)Uncategorized (21)world literature (23)