Nikolai Gogol, comedian, satirist, fantasist, social revolutionary, who doubles dream characters with real ones and reflects our world in a funhouse mirror image, who was set in motion by his friend Pushkin and was claimed by Dostoevsky as a personal source and authorial model, was a pathfinder of modern Russian literature, art, and music, who … Continue reading Nikolai Gogol, on his birthday March 31
Pouring forth words like a fountain, Bohumil Hrabal writes in a lyrical stream of consciousness, works filled with characters who are oddballs and outcasts and somehow very familiar like members of an extended family you meet at seasonal tented gatherings, of events outrageous and hilarious and also horrific and written in despair, autobiography and fantasy … Continue reading Bohumil Hrabal, on his birthday March 28
From the profoundly learned, compassionate, and very human Mario Vargas Llosa we have a feast of incontestable Great Books; an incomparable masterpiece of postmodern magical realism by way of Zola entitled The Green House , The Way to Paradise on the lives of Gauguin and his socialist-feminist grandmother, a historical novel on the great … Continue reading Mario Vargas Llosa, on his birthday March 28
“If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.” ― Tennessee Williams, Conversations with Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, The Night of the Iguana, The Glass Menagerie; the iconic films which became part of our culture, shaped cinema as an extension of … Continue reading Tennessee Williams, on his birthday March 26
“…a mythology is a control system, on the one hand framing its community to accord with an intuited order of nature and, on the other hand, by means of its symbolic pedagogic rites, conducting individuals through the ineluctable psychophysiological stages of transformation of a human lifetime – birth, childhood and adolescence, age, old age, and … Continue reading Joseph Campbell, on his birthday March 26
Grotesqueries, paradoxes, alarums and terrifying visions, suffering and redemption, the frightening of the horses; Flannery O’Connor, a self-described Thomist, is among the greatest authors the world has ever produced, and possibly the best religious writer of the modern age. Her great novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, her short story … Continue reading Flannery O’Connor, on her birthday March 25
Author of one of the very few books that changed how I think, Rudy Rucker is a mathematician who also writes fictionalized autobiographies and histories using science fiction tropes; hallucinatory, sublime, filled with scientific references and social observations, curiouser and curiouser. A wizard of numbers and their philosophical meanings, he spins stories which … Continue reading Rudy Rucker, on his birthday March 22
A poetry of language and identity, exile and dislocation, and of the effects of colonial imperialism and war; David Malouf wrestles with the origins of violence, nationalism, and racism as great themes throughout his novels. A reimagination of Tolstoy’s War and Peace set in WWII, The Great World can be numbered with On Remembering … Continue reading David Malouf, on his birthday March 20
“The breakage of verse enacts the breakage of the world.” Stephane Mallarme. Songs of chaos and beauty, Chance as totalizing and absolute, fragmentation, language play which prefigures that of Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, an obsession with secrecy and codes as narrative structure like that of Umberto Eco, founder of the French Symbolist … Continue reading Stephane Mallarme, on his birthday March 18
March 12 2025 The Idea of America As a Symbol of the Absurd: Edward Albee, On His Birthday Here I began, at the door to the Absurd, and I look back now from the other side, after a lifetime of strangeness, among the freaks and monsters myself; America was always an illusion, a figment … Continue reading Edward Albee, on his birthday March 12
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 