Literature & The Arts

If someone had told me what Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale was about, I don’t think I would have read it.

Written in 1983, the plot is three parts Gangs of New York, two parts Age of Innocence , with a dash of Dickens and a pinch of Lord of the Rings.

A turn-of-century “period piece” set in and around the city of New York, with swash-buckling swamp dwellers and flying horses.

Two strikes.

But Peter Lake is such a compelling character, who finds himself in such classical ...

I hate William Gaddis.

As a would-be writer, Gaddis has had no direct influence on me. And yet, pretty much everything I have done, or planned to do, or started to do, as a writer, which I genuinely thought to be fresh or innovative, I have come to discover has pretty much already been done by Gaddis. The invasion or interruption of action or speech with sounds, voices, lyrics, television programs, or signs ( J.R. ), the depiction of dialogue which is more competition than cooperation, ( J.R. ), ...

Milan Kundera begins with a somewhat abstract and philosophical exposition on the unbearable lightness, or weight, of being. It is pretty much all tell, and no show. And yet I loved it. I thought it was pure genius.

Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. W ...

A Frolic of His Own has some of the funniest passages I have ever read.

I’m not sure whether, if I were not a practicing attorney, I would have appreciated them less, or even more.

But the formal pleadings and deposition colloquies, for example, were exaggerated enough to bring out the comedy, yet genuine enough so as not to be absurd.

As in JR , I found the legal aspects of the novel very authentic, both in substance and in form. It is surprising that Gaddis did not go to law school, at t ...

I was at Starbucks the other day and saw a Dylan greatest hits type collection which seemed to be mostly a compilation of eighteen songs from the Greatest Hits and Greatest Hits Vol. 2 records, along with a few more recent tracks like Hurricane.

For some artists, the Greatest Hits are pretty much the only songs you would ever want to listen to. In fact, for many bands, even the Greatest Hits would only “hit” your turntable, or i-Pod, around 2 or 3 times out of 10.

But for our favor ...

There’s really not much to this book. You know exactly where it is going. And yet, when you get there, it’s still moving.

At the beginning, McCarthy pretty much tells you, flat out, what the dilemma is. (Will the father be strong enough to do what’s necessary, when the time comes?) Which, at the time, I thought was fairly “on the nose” and unnecessary.

Yet I wonder whether, absent the explicit set-up, the rest of the narrative would have held its dramatic tensi ...

I think I would have probably liked and appreciated Herzog more had I read it a long time ago.

I read Philip Roth’s introduction, and noted his comment that Herzog was like an American Leopold Bloom, except that “in Ulysses, the encyclopedic mind of the author is transmuted into the linguistic flesh of the novel, and Joyce never cedes to Bloom his own great erudition, intellect, and breadth of rhetoric, whereas in Herzog Bellow endows his hero with all of that.”

My “crit ...

As someone from New Orleans, (host of the Sugar Bowl), I am admittedly biased in favor of the traditional bowl system.

But there seem to be several reasons, aside from money and tradition, to favor it over a play-off system.

First of all, it’s generally pretty clear who the National Champion is. There is sometimes a lot of debate about who should get to play for the title in the No. 2 spot, but usually, things shake out and you have a clear No. 1 team.

(Parenthetically, let’s note t ...

I don’t think there is really any comedian around who does what Richard Pryor did. Comedians tell jokes. They make observations. Sometimes they do impressions, or impersonations. But Richard Pryor was like a method actor. He would get into character. Or multiple characters. And play them out. Some of what he said was funny in the “ha-ha” sense, but a lot of it was “funny” in the sense of pleasure that comes with enlightenment or revelation.

I obviously don ...

Despite taking Latin for five years, I still managed to eke out only a 3 on the AP. Not having placed out of the language requirement at college, Latin was an appealing alternative to the spoken language requirements, which consisted of three quarters instead of only two, as well as a pretty intensive early morning lab. Latin 1 was a breeze. But when Latin 3 came around, I was serving as pledge trainer in my fraternity, and was also taking an extra class at the time. After doing okay on t ...