essays, notes and poetry against cultural decay
Wallace Stevens is a poet of comedy, and comedy relieves the distress of tragic history. Comedy reconciles the restless, Romantic imagination with the present and the real. When the world falls apart, one must cultivate one’s garden, but also tell some comic stories over dinner. It is comedy, not alone but inseparable, that moves the infinite conversation on.
Today, 31 March, is the feast day for John Donne in the Anglican and Lutheran denominations and commemorates the metaphysical poet and reluctant priest’s death in 1631. In honour of…
The story of Ezra Pound’s mind cannot be told in plain and simple affirmations. Three twisted trees grow from this mind in all accounts: poetry, unavowable politics, and madness. They…
One year ago I was about to fly to Bali, as it turned out in the last window of easy international travel before wide COVID travel restrictions. It was a…
In April 2017 I wrote the following post in an experiment, a form of improvised association and regathering of the fragments of my mind. I will write some more of…
There are few funny stories to emerge from American politics over the last two months, especially during the constitutional embarrassment of the latest faux and cursed impeachment. There is, however,…
“Max” W.G. Sebald wrote some of the most mesmerising sui generis texts of 20th century literature. His Rings of Saturn is a collection of essays on silk, travel, depression, genocide…
But more so than the moulted carapace of governing that lies at my feet, I connected to the adventurer of the spirit, weakened by age and misfortune, that Tennyson saw in Ulysses. It was this grey spirit that I turned to this morning for the courage to continue.
I plunged again into my white box of old handwritten index cards today, and pulled from the archive, laid down in my twenties and thirties, a fragment from Mikhail Bakhtin…
In my study is a box of old index cards with fragmentary thoughts, notes on narratives and characters, and quotations taken from my reading. The box is labelled “Notes to…
Today I am reposting this post from April 2, 2018 that reflected on some of the literary symbols that formed uncanny fascinators in my mind. *** When I was about…
Prophets are despised in their own country, and now and then I am tempted deeply by Cassandra’s fate. So in appreciation of true prophets and great writers, who formed my…
