At his best, in the Great Books Grendel, October Light, and The Sunlight Dialogues, beautifully written and wonderful, illuminating, living philosophy argued with elegance and wit between unforgettable characters, John Gardner stands among the giants of our canon of literature. As a Platonic philosopher who also writes fiction, he compares to Iris Murdoch. … Continue reading John Gardner, on his birthday July 21 2025 revision
Dreamscapes and phantasms of Absurdism and Surrealist weirdness, coupled with a rigorous scholastic subversion of the three unities of traditional French theatre; time, place, and character, Robert Pinget brought a relentless methodology to his creative partnerships, as if Descartes had a driving passion for the arts. With a compositional vision and structure derived … Continue reading Robert Pinget, on his birthday July 19 2022 revision
Families both chosen and otherwise, linked together in interwoven supportive networks or shadowing his characters like an invisible reptilian tail, alienation, magic, love and desire, freedom and belief, and always the struggle for control of identities of sex and gender; themes of Tony Kushner’s theatre. Reaching deep into the bag of tricks of … Continue reading Tony Kushner, on his birthday July 16 2025 revision
Mercurial, protean, a will o’ the wisp, armed with the full panoply of literary regalia like Achilles and tilting at windmills of Augustinian thematic looming dark, with the sardonic japery of a self-aware Don Quixote spinning inside jokes at a cocktail party of the puffed up and decadent professorial fools of culture; Iris Murdoch rides … Continue reading Iris Murdoch, on her birthday July 15 2025 revision
“A tiger doesn’t proclaim his tigritude, he pounces.” Wole Soyinka A Tiger of rebellion and the unconquered heart, Wole Soyinka created a uniquely African theatre of Swiftian satire and protest which drew on influences from Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett, and Berthold Brecht, often directly modeled on classic works of European drama but also … Continue reading Wole Soyinka, on his birthday July 14 2025 revision
Sometimes when you hold a seashell to your ear you hear more than an echo; there is another world within, invisible and surrounding us like a gossamer mist of perfumes, bearing memories; such are the poems of Pablo Neruda. Full of insights and beauty, magic and passion, death and tragedy, earthiness and illumination, … Continue reading Pablo Neruda, on his birthday July 12, 2025 revision
His great and immense classic In Search of Lost Time is at root a quest for meaning and identity in a world which offers diversions but few reliable signposts, and Marcel Proust himself was a figure of Parsifal or the Holy Fool, dropping handfuls of delicious poeticisms along his trail. Always a joy to read … Continue reading Marcel Proust, on his birthday July 10, 2025 revision
Songs of darkness and the contingency and irrelevance of human life, the emptiness and cardboard-set illusion of our values and ideals as in the great film Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the idiocy and madness of the gods of our universe and the active threat and menace of their hostility; with themes of nihilism and … Continue reading Thomas Ligotti, on his birthday July 9, 2025 revision
In her novel The Abyss she has traversed the great massif of time itself to speak in counterpoint to her younger self, the two voices interwoven; as if riding the two arms of a clock, aligning only at the meeting points of the hours. It was in honor of her work that I … Continue reading Marguerite Yourcenar, on her birthday July 8, 2025 revision
Polymath, Surrealist, and artistic visionary, Jean Cocteau helped forge the lexicon of cinema and both wrote and enacted the glorious possibilities of being human, like a living Torch of Liberty. Among his classics of world literature are The Holy Terrors, The White Book, Intimate Relations, and his unforgettable films. In The Holy … Continue reading Jean Cocteau, on his birthday July 5 2025 revision
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 