The Italians: A Full-Length Portrait Featuring Their Manners and Morals, Luigi Barzini Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic, Silvana Patriarca The Pursuit of Italy, David Gilmour The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean, A Short History of Byzantium, A History of Venice, Sicily: An … Continue reading Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: Italy
Primal fairytales and narratives of revolutionary intent; Margaret Atwood is a goddess of Liberty who comes bearing ax and torch to free us from our cages. While teaching her books I always referred to her as the greatest writer of the 20th century because her novels recapitulate and transform the whole history of civilization, … Continue reading Margaret Atwood, on her birthday November 18 2021 revision
Freedom, history, identity, values, and the conflict of tradition versus modernity; Chinua Achebe spoke of independence in the context of his own Igbo culture and its struggle against colonialism, but also in terms of our universal human condition. He wrote of his own experience, but for us all. Chinua Achebe famously denounced his … Continue reading Chinua Achebe, on his birthday November 16 2025 revision
In works which explore madness, faith, values, identity, history, the necessity of freedom and the limits of action, and all of this in the shadow of an Authority which rules the material world like a warden devil and must be resisted, Fyodor Dostoevsky has given us a key to balancing conservative and revolutionary forces … Continue reading Fyodor Dostoevsky, on his birthday November 11 2021 revision
Surrealist-Absurdist narratives of Kafka-esque nightmares, the theatrical techniques of Brecht, Artaud, Ionesco, and Beckett, and a prose aesthetic developed from Genet, Robbe-Grillet, and Queneau, with a vast intellect and command of history and culture; Peter Weiss has created treasures of world literature and theatre whose power to motivate change and transform meaning will endure … Continue reading Peter Weiss, on his birthday November 8
The works of Albert Camus have become foundational to me personally and to our civilization, studied in every high school in America as core curriculum and by anyone else pursuing an education; these include the great novels The Stranger, The Fall, and The Plague, as well as the philosophical essays in The Myth of … Continue reading Albert Camus, on his birthday November 7 2021 revision
Fantasies of Absurdism with Surrealist imagery and the Existential doubt and anxiety of Sartre, a theatre of mythic America shadowed by the nihilistic terror of Beckett; Sam Shepard wrote, acted, and directed tragedies of social fragmentation and dysfunctional families with lyrical and unique beauty. Among his finest works are nightmare dreamscapes of dystopian … Continue reading Sam Shepard, on his birthday November 5 2021 revision
“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 before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.” John … Continue reading John Keats, on his birthday October 31 2021 revision
Who is this Absurd fellow Lovecraft, with his gorgeous phraseology and peculiar allegiance to British rather than American English, his Surreal strangeness, bizarre Sadeian transgression, Freudian horror, and poetics of fear? Above all in this age of political polarization and historical culture and identity as a ground of struggle, how are we to … Continue reading October 26 2021 On Fear as the Basis of Exchange and the Terror of Our Nothingness: the Case of Lovecraft
History The Discovery of India: History, Culture, Politics, Religion and Philosophy of India, Jawaharlal Nehru Ka, Roberto Calasso Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God, Jonah Blank The Wonder That Was India: A Survey of the History and Culture of the Indian Sub-Continent before the coming of the Muslims, A.L. Basham … Continue reading Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2021 Edition World Literature: India
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 