Category: uncategorized
- What Is Sex?Lauren Groff seems to be gently suggesting that sex is a human energy that doesn’t necessarily interfere with a religious life. They can co-exist. They should co-exist.Read more
- Pandemic Without PanicThe Vulnerables a novel by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books. 242 pp. **** Early reviewers of Sigrid Nunez’ The Vulnerables are linking it to her most recent novels (The Friend, which won a National Book Award, and What Are You Going Through, which was equally deserving of that award), seeing the three books as a trilogy. The ...Read more
- Sheer TalentFred Chappell 1936-2024 I met Fred Chappell at a retirement dinner for William Blackburn, the revered creative writing teacher at Duke University. I wasn’t there as a writer (in what turned out to be Blackburn’s last year as a professor, I had the choice of taking his creative writing class or his class in Elizabethan and ...Read more
- Quotations from My Reading–from Septology, by the 2023 Nobel Prize laureate Jon Fosse, a Catholic convert: “and when I wasn’t painting I often spent hour after hour just sitting and staring into space, yes, I can sit for a long time and just stare into empty space, at nothing, and it’s sort of like something can come from the ...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
- To NowhereThe Silk Road by Kathryn Davis. Graywolf Press. 132 pp. **** I was thinking I would start this review with the sentence, “This is the strangest book I’ve ever read,” then thought, wait a minute. Three Novels, by Samuel Beckett. If the whole volume doesn’t qualify (and it does), The Unnameable alone would do the trick. ...Read more
- Spinning Tales(The Faulkner Project) The Unvanquished from Faulkner Novels 1936-1040. Library of America. ***** By the time you reach Absalom, Absalom! in a survey of Faulkner’s fiction, you can’t help being overwhelmed by the sheer verbal power. It’s been there all along; there were passages even in Soldiers’ Pay, and it blossomed in Flags in the Dust, ...Read more
- So Is This MovieDick Johnson Is Dead a film by Kirsten Johnson. With Dick Johnson, Kirsten Johnson, and assorted others. * According to the IMDb website, “On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 100% based on 75 reviews.” I’m utterly dumbfounded by that fact. The basic premise of this movie is not just bewildering ...Read more
- HemHemingway | A Writer (1899-1929) a film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Available on PBS streaming. ***** Hemingway was the first writer I loved and the primary inspiration for my becoming a writer. When I was fifteen years old my English teacher told us to read a biography of a writer, and I chose a ...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
- Getting Pablo Out of BedLife with Picasso by Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake. New York Review of Books Classics. 344 pp. $17.95. I picked up this book because my wife had read it and talked about it endlessly on our morning walks. Francoise Gilot was the fourth major woman in Picasso’s life (there were any number of minor ones); when ...Read more
- Is the Pope Catholic? Which One?The Two Popes a film by Fernando Meirelles. Written by Anthony McCarten. With Anthony Hopkins, Jonathan Pryce ***** Can you imagine Donald Trump suddenly deciding the job is too much for him? He hadn’t really intended to be President, he’d just wanted to establish his brand and go back to being a businessman. Now he’s in ...Read more
- Gaining FavourThe Favourite a film by Yorgis Lanthimos. With Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone. **** The Favourite is one of those movies that takes a historical setting—in this case early eighteenth century Great Britain—and throws a bunch of characters into it who seem entirely modern, so we wind up thinking how funny it all is without ...Read more
- A Rage to ConnectAt Eternity’s Gate a film by Julian Schnabel. With Willem Dafoe, Rubert Friend, Oscar Isaac, Emmanuelle Seigner. ****1/2 I don’t know how many movies there have been about Vincent Van Gogh, though I myself have seen three or four. I have not seen the 1956 portrayal by Kirk Douglas, and don’t believe I will. Ever since I was a kid ...Read more
- Slices from a Hard LifeA Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin. Picador. 403 pp. $17.00. ****1/2 It would seem there should be nothing easier than to do what Lucia Berlin did in a short story career than spanned four decades. Lead an adventurous, somewhat screwed-up life, full of addiction and bad marriages, write up little slices of it, sometimes not apparently changing things at ...Read more
- Murder Will Out. And Then SomeThe Secret History by Donna Tartt. Vintage. 559 pp. $16.95 **** The first thing to say about The Secret History is that it is a drunk novel. Not since the days of Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Hemingway have I read a book where so much booze is consumed, at such odd hours and so unwisely. I’m not ...Read more
- Master Craftsman Having FunFour Novels of the 1980’s: City Primeval, LaBrava, Glitz, Freaky Deaky by Elmore Leonard. Library of America. 1010 pp. $37.50. Elmore Leonard began to relax into his craft when he entered the decade of the eighties, when he would turn 60. He had stopped drinking, for one thing, spoke openly about how that affected him. He ...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
- The Secret of Life That We Are All Looking ForBeing Bodies: Buddhist Women on the Paradox of Embodiment edited by Lenore Friedman &Susan Moon. Shambhala. 240 pp. $15.00. As I’ve said before, I think that the women teachers in my tradition—the Soto Zen lineage that goes back to the San Francisco Zen Center—are often the most interesting. There’s something about the extreme rigors of Zen, ...Read more
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The River is Freedom, the Raft ParadiseThe Nothing of GodWe Are Stardust We Are GoldenA State of the Union and a State of MindEmbodied Mystic
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (114)American literature (195)art (108)Buddhism (162)Christianity (119)creative process (230)death and dying (128)meditation (117)movies (152)music (36)race (94)religion (179)sex (156)spirituality (166)the art of narrative (236)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)