Song of Beirut Here a great nothingness has swallowed the voices of the past Yet they live within us, songs of ourselves and the limitless possibilities of becoming human How can we answer the terror of our nothingness The flaws of our humanity And the brokenness of the world? Here among the ruins of a … Continue reading January 31 2022 Song of Beirut
“The writer’s job is the job of a clown, the clown who also talks about sorrow.” Kenzaburo Oe Rabelaisian grotesques of realism which tend to the transgressive and surreal revolutionary visions of de Sade and Akutagawa; antiheroes branded with public shame as if with the Scarlet Letter of Nathaniel Hawthorne and heir to … Continue reading Kenzaburo Oe, on his birthday January 31
Herald of Existentialism, satirist of derelict antiquity and its aristocratic ghosts, and champion of the peasant class of which he was a member, Anton Chekov helped realize the principles of the Enlightenment and create the modern world, innovating many of the techniques of literary Modernism and using them to carry forward the mission of … Continue reading Anton Chekov, on his birthday January 29 2026 revision
I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; this is possibly a confession of faith, though if asked directly I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed … Continue reading January 28 I Sing of Madness, Vision, and Love: Lewis Carroll, on his birthday January 27, 2025 revision, which I celebrate on the 28th because the 27th is also Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Liberation of Auschwitz, and the 26th is Australia’s Indigenous Mourning Day, and I Need Something Wonderful to Balance the Darkness
For his Russian translations and biography of Solzhenitsyn alone I would adore him; they remain a feat of great scholarship and a service to the world. He has a stellar debut, The Flute Player, a great novel, The White Hotel, and his poetry can stand on its own. The Flute Player is a … Continue reading D.M. Thomas, on his birthday January 27 2026 revision
Time, death, and the terrible beauty of being alive; human relationships and the modern pathology of disconnectedness, autonomy and power asymmetries of sex and gender, the construction of gender identity and the Gordian Knot thereof; Virginia Woolf explores all of this in exquisite prose, balancing her Feminist Existentialism with an Idealism like that of Keats. … Continue reading Virginia Woolf, on her birthday January 25 2025 revision
Subtle and deceptive, with beautiful and seductive language, Edith Wharton negotiates the boundaries between Realism and Romantic Idealism, intertwining the themes and aesthetics of Milton and Byron with those of Jean Racine and Victor Hugo. The Age of Innocence, an incontestable classic and Great Book, is a Chekhov-like interrogation of class, wealth, and gender … Continue reading Edith Wharton, on her birthday January 24 2022 revision
Flannery O’Connor’s South, Robert Coles The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, Willian Faulkner William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom ed William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond, Cleanth Brooks One Matchless Time: A Life … Continue reading Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition Literature of the American South
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Man in the High Castle, The Minority Report, Lies, Inc., Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, Valis, The Divine Invasion, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, Philip K. Dick Mind in Motion: the fiction of Philip … Continue reading Jay’s Revised Modern Canon Modern American Literature 2022 Edition American Science and other Fictions
A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, The Night of the Iguana, The Glass Menagerie, Orpheus Descending, Not About Nightingales, Tennessee Williams The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams Tennessee Williams’ Plays; Memory, Myth, and Symbol, Judith J. Thompson Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, John Lahr Tennessee … Continue reading Jay’s Revised Modern Canon American Drama
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 