Books
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I'm beginning to suspect that Jean-Luc Godard is an over-rated filmmaker. Or at least that I don't care very much for his work. Maybe ten years ago I saw Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part), and really liked it. But I suspect that may have been only because of a few charming scenes involving the beautiful and…
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Back in early 1970, during my last official undergraduate semester of college, I read Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (1966) for a class. "Religion in the Contemporary Novel," or something like that. I had only six months or so earlier become really acquainted with his music, by way of the album Songs From A Room. I had heard…
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On Monday my wife and I watched the last episode of the second series of Man In the High Castle, the TV series (if that's the right term for a multi-segment drama released all at once for Internet streaming) based loosely on Philip K. Dick's alternate-history novel in which the Germans and Japanese win World War…
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It's surprisingly good–and not-weird. There is a famous speech that he gave at some award thing–Grammy awards maybe–that is quite weird. But it is funny that he felt obliged to tell us that Shakespeare is a "great literary figure." Maybe he thought they might not have heard of Shakespeare in Sweden. (Thanks to Stu for…
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I've had this book on my shelf for a couple of years or so but only recently got around to reading it. That was partly in response to replies to the question I posed a couple of months (?) ago asking for recommendations for excellent contemporary prose stylists. Hart's name was mentioned, and I'd been…
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I have been enjoying this book occasionally since the late 1970s, but have still not read it in its entirety. I pick it up, read a few bits here and there, then put it down again, sometimes for years. I was looking at it recently and it occurred to me that I should mention it…
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Still reading The Seven Storey Mountain, and liking it a lot. This passage struck me. Merton is making a Holy Week retreat at Gethsemani, prior to entering the Trappist order. Observing the other guests, he notes these: …and there were three or four pious men who turned out to be friends and benefactors of the monastery–quiet,…
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The soul of man, left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness. It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside and above itself. But when the light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and…
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For literature? Here's one of many news stories on the announcement that are out this morning. Much as I love much of his work, I don't really think so. If there were a Nobel Prize for popular music, absolutely yes. But something called "literature" should be able to stand alone on the page, and I don't…
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[This post is going to stay at the top for a week or two. Scroll down for newer posts.] As regular readers of this blog know, I've published a book that contains what I consider to be the best of the Sunday Night Journal, a weekly feature that ran for most of a decade here.…
Light On Dark Water 