A Russian mystic who railed against the formal authoritarian power and depersonalization of both organized religion and government, an aristocrat whose father had been assassinated by the communists, then driven into penniless exile, a vendetta he pursued through all his writing and the source of his magnificent critique of the failure of socialism as a … Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov, on his birthday April 22, 2021 Revision
I too once bore the icon of Saint Beatrice of the Absurd as did he, following the tracks of Dante through a blighted and ravaged series of otherworlds, bereft of dictums, of referents, a journey in which all the signs had been switched so that self-referential language led outward to realms unknown and the places … Continue reading Samuel Beckett, on his birthday April 13, 2021 Revision
The definitive biography of Roth, and a study of how patriarchy victimizes its perpetrators, has now been written by Blake Bailey. Few literary figures have struggled with ownership of identity and internalized oppression on the scale of Roth, the Jew exiled by his tribe. In this he is a parallel of Jerzy Kosinski, a Polish … Continue reading Philip Roth, on his birthday March 19
As we begin our annual celebration of Women’s History Month, I am struck once more with the vast and awesome task which the ancestresses and warrior matriarchs of our modern world set for themselves under the banner of Feminism; no less than the total reimagination of humankind and our historical civilization. This subsumes cultural … Continue reading March 2 2021 Women’s History Month: Feminism as Revolutionary Struggle and a Reimagination of Humankind in Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Literary Theory, and Alternate Histories
Valentine’s Day is a holiday we can celebrate as an unambiguous good, without conflicted historical legacies; named in honor of a man who was executed on February 14 278 AD for performing gay marriages in defiance of Imperial law, adelphopoiesis or brother-making which refers to his marrying Roman soldiers not to their girlfriends but … Continue reading February 14 2021 On the Redemptive and Transformational Power of Love
Among the best and the worst of us, our Presidents function as authorized national identities and as symbols and figures of the American soul. Beyond the power to reshape us and our future through electoral politics and legislative action, those we choose as our leaders always have this more primary role in our society, and … Continue reading February 15 2021 Among the Best and the Worst of Us: Our Presidents as Symbols and Figures of the American Soul
The journey as allegory and metaphor in a historical novel of the Spanish Civil War, a biography of Pablo Neruda, and a philosophical metacommentary on memory, identity, and history, Isabel Allende’s A Long Petal of the Sea is many things as seen from different angles of view, but like her classic novel and masterpiece of … Continue reading A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende Hispanic-American & Latin America
Myth and history here comingle in this insightful interrogation of colonialism, which describes the legendary journey of Livingston’s African attendants to return his body to England in terms of a Chaucerian pilgrimage, and referential to Faulkner. An astounding feat of scholarship in terms of research and of literary wizardry as an interior history … Continue reading Out of Darkness, Shining Light by Petina Gappah Africa -Zimbabwe
A beloved children’s author turns to historical fiction as an interrogation of patriarchy and weaponized faith in this gorgeous account of the Norwegian witch trials of 1618, perpetrated equally as sexual and religious terror and the assimilation and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Sami people. Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies reveals mechanisms of … Continue reading The Mercies, Kiran Millwood Hargrave Britain
An instant classic which has been anointed as the “Doctor Zhivago of Iran” by no less an eminence than Margaret Atwood, Nazanine Hozar’s Aria is an epic drama of the people and history forged in the 1979 Revolution, filled with vivid Dickensian characters from Tehran’s myriads of social classes, faiths, nationalities, and centered on the … Continue reading Aria, Nazanine Hozar Islamic Peoples- Iran
