The brutalization of war and other violence, the dehumanization of both victims and perpetrators, identity confusion, madness, a pathology of disconnectedness and alienation, misogyny; these are the themes of Rabe’s plays and novels of toxic masculinity, the anchorages of his world. Authoritative and devastating when speaking as a witness of history about events he … Continue reading David Rabe, on his birthday March 10
Heir to the tradition of Akutagawa’s Kappa, which documented his descent into madness and founded Japanese Surrealism, as well as that of Kafka to whom he is often compared, Kobo Abe lives at the intersection of Albert Camus’ songs of rebellion, Jean Paul Sartre’s diatribes of alienation and rebirth, the Surrealist satires and assault on … Continue reading Kobo Abe, on his birthday March 7
Founder of the dominant literary style of the late 20th century, inescapable as a force of history, who bestrode a continent like a colossus, Gabriel García Márquez wrestles with vast personal and social themes and issues in his novels, with beautiful and grotesque prose. He writes books to survive tragedies by, violence and … Continue reading Gabriel García Márquez, on his birthday March 6
Tom Wolfe is a Poirot of current culture, with sharp eyes and exquisite taste, as if he were writing the society pages with absolute transparency and intimate curiosity, including everyone, and particularly using methods of comparative anthropology to illuminate themes and issues in our society by juxtaposing characters from divergent social classes and exploring … Continue reading Tom Wolfe, on his birthday March 2
Beautiful writing, elegantly conceived and precisely enacted, luminous and by turns delicate and outrageously cruel; but peel back the skin of words and we have an architecture of sociopolitical criticism and a force of moral vision driving this beast. A very English socialism concerned with fairness and the well-being of others, his works … Continue reading Jim Crace, on his birthday March 1
Of Akutagawa’s fantastical, multivalent short stories, two are important must-reads, the first being the universally acclaimed Rashomon. Kurosawa made one of the world’s great films of it, and as a worldview the Rashomon Effect has been applied to a broad spectrum of academic disciplines- possibly the only short story to become an empirical method. … Continue reading Ryunosuke Akutagawa, on his birthday March 1
Eminently cultured satirist and mocker of false idols, he took apart, tested & remade the pillars of our civilization in his novels, which read like the histories of alternate realities. In fact they are also a manual; he intends that we continue his work. Dazzling verbal fireworks and prestidigitation, a magician’s grand trick, written … Continue reading Anthony Burgess, on his birthday February 25
I shall celebrate it by doing something naughty, and I hope that you do the same. Endless autobiographical fictions spun of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein’s Modernist literary inventions, the relativity of truth and values and an implicit Feminism enacted perhaps more fully in her life than in that of Simone de Beauvoir … Continue reading Anais Nin, on her birthday February 21
Misunderstandings, translations, the shifting nature of history, wherein truth and identity can be endlessly reinterpreted; there are multiple levels of ambiguity and confusion in Amy Tan’s novels, resulting from the disconnect between oral narrative conventions of Chinese mothers using traditional storytelling and the conceptual frames of their American daughters. A main theme of her … Continue reading Amy Tan, on her birthday February 19
Transformations of history into mythology, songs of survival and resistance, of rapture and the triumph of the spirit, ghosts and the presence of the past and its legacies in our lives now, as if the generations of a family were reflected forward into the future as primary shaping forces of identity; the works of … Continue reading Toni Morrison, on her birthday February 18
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 