On reading ambitions
It should be known that the above-mentioned hidalgo, during the periods when he was idle –…
Donne’s sermons and the blogging tradition
Image Source: Oil Painting, John Donne (1573-1631), at the age of 49. Anon. British School, 1622. Victoria…
Parables of Shame
Franz Kafka was a poet of shame and guilt. So writes Saul Friedlander in his Franz Kafka:…
A list of writers of fragments
A blog is a fragmentary artwork, or at least it can be. So the blog’s aesthetic…
Allusiveness
When I used to play World of Warcraft – happy nights, even if not the best…
Repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
The poem that I have been memorising, learning, getting by heart tonight is Zbigniew Herbert’s “The…
Finnegans Awwwake agoin
Out of a whim, I opened again, as if for the first time, that great scary book…
A list of 21 books that shaped me
This list may never end, or so the green dream of the solitary reader goes: 1….
Going sane writing
Adam Phillips says somewhere, perhaps in one of his intriguing essays, perhaps in an interview with the…
List: my lacunae in Bloom’s Western Canon
I admire Harold Bloom and his scorn for the New Schools of Resentment. I recognise my…