Category: sex
- 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
- Jane Austen Meets MachiavelliLove & Friendship A film by Whit Stillman, with Kate Beckinsale, Chloe Sevigny, Xavier Samuel, Tom Bennett. ****1/2 Love & Friendship centers on a single character—Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale)—and she controls the action the way a great conductor directs an orchestra. She is not only in almost every scene but is the focus of those ...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
- 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
- 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
- I Used to Think I Wanted to Be PromiscuousA Severed Head by Iris Murdoch. Penguin. 205 pp. $15.00 Everything about my reading of Iris Murdoch has changed since I read Dwight Garner’s review of her new volume of letters and A.N. Wilson’s marvelous memoir. Wilson was right in his introduction; I had perhaps unconsciously reduced her in my mind to the dotty old woman ...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
- The Bitter Face of a Marriage45 Years A Film by Andrew Haigh In the same weekend, a friend e-mailed to tell me that 45 Years was a great film—he had just seen it with his wife to celebrate his 63rd birthday—and I heard another friend say, to someone who asked, “Don’t bother. The whole damn thing is too depressing.” I don’t think ...Read more
- For the Holidays You Can’t Beat Home Sweet Home. Dad’s Demented. Mom’s Nuts.The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Picador. 566pp. $17.00 The Corrections is the ultimate dissection of a dysfunctional family. It’s 566 pages and basically concerns only five people, who are locked in an epic family battle that seems never to end. Chip is the brilliant brother who had a substantial and flourishing career as a professor until ...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
- The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name Just SpokeCarol a film by Todd Haynes Carol is an almost unbelievably stylized, artful film. It isn’t just that the movie is a work of art, or that every scene is a work of art; every shot is a work of art. A shot of Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) riding away in a rain-sprinkled cab is full ...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
- Life Is Grand (as long as You Keep Your Hands off My Sister)My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. Europa Editions. 331 pp. $17.00. I stand in awe at the power and variety of literature that I can read two novels consecutively that are so great—I don’t think the word is an exaggeration—and so completely different as Infinite Jest and My Brilliant Friend, which is the first novel of ...Read more
- Only the Dead Know ItBrooklyn A film by John Crowley Brooklyn is like a dream. Like Bridge of Spies it takes place in 1950’s America (apparently the year is 1952, because our young couple sees Singin’ in the Rain), and like that earlier movie it gets the look of the era right. But while Bridge of Spies focused on a ...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
- Everybody Knew but Nobody Was Talkin’Spotlight A film by Tom McCarthy Spotlight is an absolutely thrilling movie, one of those newspaper movies where reporters shout at each other, slam their fists on the desk, burst into the records office a few minutes before closing time, run down the sidewalk shouting for a taxi, stay up too late, write at incredible speeds, ...Read more
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Dogen for the MassesWeird From the Get GoTwo MasterpiecesMary, Erica, MirandaUntil the End
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (121)American literature (218)art (114)Buddhism (170)Christianity (125)creative process (249)death and dying (139)meditation (124)movies (161)music (36)race (106)religion (188)sex (172)spirituality (171)the art of narrative (255)Uncategorized (20)world literature (23)