Light On Dark Water

December 7, 2015

52 Authors: Week 49 – Thomas Merton

This is the condition of my copy of No Man is an Island. If a writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people you have got to make up your mind to write things
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December 5, 2015

Bonzo Dog Band: Sport (The Odd Boy)

It's an odd boy who doesn't like sport.
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November 30, 2015

52 Authors: Week 48 – Mary Renault

Although Mary Renault was not a trained historian, she is best known for her historical and mythic-historical novels set in ancient Greece. I won't say much about the mythic-historical novels, which read like historical novels but are distinguished by the presence of characters from Greek mythology. They feature clever inventions that satisfy both naturalistic storytelling
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November 22, 2015

52 Authors: Week 47 – Walker Percy

I've read all of Walker Percy's books, some of them two or three times, with the exception of the non-fiction Message in the Bottle. (I consciously chose not to read it because I was under the impression that it was a fairly technical piece of philosophy and linguistic theory, but I've been told that I'm mistaken about
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November 21, 2015

The Bonzo Dog Band: Look At Me I’m Wonderful

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November 19, 2015

Three Small But Worthwhile Movies

The little town where I live, Fairhope, Alabama, has always had an artsy element, which is nice, but over the past few decades the town has grown fashionable and attractive to wealthy people, which is not so nice. And now the artsy crowd also tends to be wealthy and fashionable. I don't care for this
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November 16, 2015

52 Authors: Week 46 – Tolstoy

Christopher Plummer as Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station I am not a Tolstoy expert, but I sometimes play one in my personal life. But really… I have only read War and Peace once, Anna Karenina 2.5 times, and The Death of Ivan Ilych (once also); and that’s it. At the time I read War
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November 15, 2015

Food For Thought On the Paris Attacks

When some calamity like this happens, I generally don't remark on it here or on Facebook. Unless I personally know someone affected, it seems like an empty gesture. Does anyone reading this care one way or the other if I express my sympathy for the victims? I doubt it. But of course I have been reading
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November 12, 2015

Apropos

From Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, spoken by the narrator but probably the author's view: Students are, if the truth be known, a bad lot. En masse they're as fickle as a mob, manipulable by any professor who'll stoop to it. They have, moreover, an infinite capacity for repeating dull truths and old lies with
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November 11, 2015

This is weirdly brilliant.
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