A task: from Milosz to me
This morning I read this poem. “A task” by Czelaw Milosz, chosen randomly from his collected …
The poet W as comedian
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.
Donne’s sermons and the blogging tradition
Today, 31 March, is the feast day for John Donne in the Anglican and Lutheran denominations…
Ezra Pound, the unavowable fury of thy true heritage in fragments
The story of Ezra Pound’s mind cannot be told in plain and simple affirmations. Three twisted…
The persistence of the Mahabharata
One year ago I was about to fly to Bali, as it turned out in the…
Sponges, metamorphoses and psyche
In April 2017 I wrote the following post in an experiment, a form of improvised association…
Sound and fury told by the American cultural “elite”
There are few funny stories to emerge from American politics over the last two months, especially…
Sebald’s sentences
“Max” W.G. Sebald wrote some of the most mesmerising sui generis texts of 20th century literature….
This grey spirit seeking a sinking star
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.
Fragments from the Burning Archive: Mikhail Bakhtin
I plunged again into my white box of old handwritten index cards today, and pulled from…