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
“Life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come”, Franz Kafka. Of Franz … Continue reading Franz Kafka, on his birthday July 3 2025 revision
To Herman Hesse, my first literary love, I shall be eternally grateful for the doors of possibility which he has opened, and which his writing continues to do for others as the tides of history roll on. In my thirteenth year I found his great and classic books, which I read in the … Continue reading Herman Hesse, on his birthday July 2 2025 revision
There is no literature without Sartre. In our great quest to create ourselves and become free and independent beings throughout our lives, to test the limits of the human and grow beyond them into the unknown places marked Here Be Dragons on our maps of being, meaning, and value, to transgress the boundaries … Continue reading Jean Paul Sartre, on his birthday June 21 2022 revision
Author of surrealist- magical realist fantasies written with a musical lyricism, the whispers of a strange and subversive dreamtime, his stories highly personalized reshapings of archaic myths, in a free and Joycean prose; championed by Dylan Thomas, influencer of Wole Soyinka and indeed all subsequent anti-colonialist literature, Amos Tutuola is a foundational figure of … Continue reading Amos Tutuola, on his birthday June 20 2025 revision
A Suitable Boy is an Indian national epic in the way that the Iliad served the Roman Empire as its origin story; but instead of an ancient oral tradition codified in final form as propaganda by an Imperial government working through teams of scholars we have a personal vision of national identity which springs fully … Continue reading Vikram Seth, on his birthday June 20 2025 revision
Identity, power, justice, the depravity and perversity of man and the origins of evil; these are the great themes which animate the works of Jerzy Kosinski. His unique brand of Catholic Existentialism, referential to Camus and Freud as much as Augustine and the Bible, has never been widely understood. Nor has the influence of … Continue reading Jerzy Kosinski, on his birthday June 14 2022 revision
Djuna Barnes is Promethean in her rebellion, a thief of the fire of the gods, a figure out of Milton or Blake, wielding her Lacanian vision into character and the human condition like the camera of Annie Leibovitz, starting fires everywhere she looks, ablating illusions and subliming us her readers into purified figures like … Continue reading Djuna Barnes, on her birthday June 12 2026 revision
Tragedies of loneliness and sadness, empty desires and uncommunicable loves, dangerous illusions and madness; yet written with voluptuous, gorgeous language, like refined and spare haiku prose-poems; the works of Yasunari Kawabata are a last stand of meaning and elegance in a world robbed of its significance. Like all who battle against time and … Continue reading Yasunari Kawabata, on his birthday June 11 2026 revision
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 