Category: Words
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The American Left and the Problems of History in Philip Roth’s “American Trilogy”
I wrote this essay in 2004—for an academic conference, if I recall correctly. The plan was to revise and expand it for that dissertation I never managed to finish.
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A Death in the Family (1957)
I just found this intro to an essay I never wrote and thought the quotes were worth posting.
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Book Meme
This year I’m going to reread a few of the books that inspired me to become an English major way back when. I’m curious to see, fifteen years later, how my sense of the novels has evolved. So far, Nabokov is more impressive and Humbert is more disturbing than I remembered. Case in point:
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Ron Austin’s In a New Light: Spirituality and the Media Arts
This essay was originally published at Sojourners.
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The Friday Five: DeLillo
In celebration of the release of Falling Man, which I plan to begin reading tonight, and inspired by James Tata’s post, I’m bringing back the long lost “Friday Five”: My Favorite Don DeLillo Novels
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What Are You Reading?
A few words on a few of the books I’ve been enjoying lately.
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So Awfully, Irreducibly Real
Tony Kushner is taken to task from time to time for his harsh treatment of Joe Pitts, the closeted, Republican, Mormon lawyer whose self-hatred motivates so much of the plays’ drama (and poisons his marriage to Harper). Those critics must ignore this passage, which is among the most beautiful and heartbreaking Kushner has written. It’s been at the very back of my mind for nearly a week now but came front and center earlier this evening.
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A Long Way Down (2005)
Kakutani’s reading seems lazy to me. She’s misjudged these folks — not to mention Hornby’s intentions — and is punching herself silly, chasing after her straw men.
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No Reservations
I read a book last weekend. A 302-page book. I was standing in Borders on Friday night, waiting for Joanna to get a drink, and I picked up a book, read the first few pages, and decided to buy it. Then I went home and finished it in three or four sittings.
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How ‘Bout That
How’s that for the perfect end to my academic career? I got a good note in The Times Literary Supplement!
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The Human Stain (2003)
But the adaptation of a written text to film also necessarily foregrounds the authority of images, imposing specificity on what an author might have chosen to describe more generally. I was surprised, for example, to find myself suddenly moved by an image of the small boxes in which Faunia stores the ashes of her dead children. In the novel, surprisingly little emphasis is placed on the ashes; Roth does not make of them an excuse for one of his patented ten-page diversions.
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For the Artist’s Sake
E. L. Doctorow delivered the following speech before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee in the fall of 1981. Given the on-going budget battles in Congress, Doctorow’s words are also more than a bit timely.
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Random Thoughts Inspired by Time’s List of 100 Great Novels
You know, I’ve spent the better part of the last decade reading and studying 20th century lit, and I’ve still only read 27 of the best 100 books. Where did I go wrong?
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Haruki Murakami
The fall semester of my ESL class kicked off last night, and we began with a discussion of Haruki Murakami’s “The Elephant Vanishes,” which is, quite frankly, one of the most beautiful stories I’ve ever read.
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The Moviegoer (1962)
If you’re reading this in the future — say, you’ve wandered here via some poof of Google magic — you should know that if I were to turn on my television right now (now being the afternoon of September 2, 2005), I’d flip past image after image after image of destruction, violence, and misery.
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A Few Words on . . .
Week in Review: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, John Vanderslice, DeLillo, Hornby, Jarmusch, and The Battle of Algiers
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So We Beat On . . .
I love how, despite his disgust and anger, Nick is still moved by the vision — how he is unable to ignore its beauty while also acknowledging the human misery that now populates the land. This one paragraph, in both tone and theme, is the entire novel in concentrated form. Amazing.
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Great Critics (And the Rest of Us)
Yesterday I made the mistake of pulling Christopher Bigsby’s latest book from the library shelf. Arthur Miller: A Critical Study (2005) will, I assume, be Bigsby’s final statement on Miller.
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The Same as It Ever Was
That Mailer’s opinion of the corporate executive echoes exactly D.J. Jethroe’s is no coincidence, for this selective amnesia — this sense that all is permissible so long as it is state-sanctioned, to the benefit of American markets, and hidden from plain view — is, according to Mailer, precisely why America was in Vietnam.
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Kushner on Miller
“Although he refused the mechanical determinism of the unthinking Marxist left, he created in his greatest play a drama in which it is impossible to avoid thinking about economics–money–in any attempt to render coherent the human tragedy unfolding before you.”
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New Perspectives
So, this is kind of exciting. My copy of Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author just arrived, hot off the proverbial press. My article, “The ‘Written World’ of Philip Roth’s Nonfiction,” is the 17th and final chapter in what I believe is the first book-length study of Roth’s entire body of work, up to and including The Plot Against America. Pretty cool. My first book chapter.
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Beyond
Karen has stumbled upon a wonderful discovery. If you take a magazine, remove all of the stuff that is designed to make you spend money (between 40% and 100% of the content of most mags), and replace that crap with stories, essays, interviews, photos, and jaw-dropping design, you end up with something like art.
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Notes on “Sonny’s Blues”
Like a soloist, Baldwin introduces an idea, a phrase, then he explores it, explodes it, develops it until he finds something new, something more precise or melodic. Baldwin accomplishes in his story what Sonny accomplishes in that jazz club. And, really, isn’t this just the most beautiful “vanishing evocation” (as the narrator describes music) of what art is capable of doing?
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Arthur Miller
Miller’s politics made him an enemy of the Right when he balked at the hypocrisy of anti-communist politicking, and an enemy of the Left when his “confused liberalism” (in the words of Eric Mottram) was deemed unsatisfactory at a time of revolutionary struggle. Miller, for his part, seemed most interested in simply understanding the human causes of human troubles. The work of the artist, you might say.
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Usable Questions
While flipping through the pages of College English in search of an early Frederic Jameson article, I found and photocopied a two-page piece by Ira Shor, which I’ve transcribed below.
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Media Blackout
“I’m a Communist because I want the people to take the power that comes with ownership away from the little class of capitalists who have it now.” Subtle, eh?
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When (My) Worlds Collide
“He just sits there drinking iced tea, never ordering a thing to eat. So he was married to Marilyn Monroe. Big deal.” “Um, that was Arthur Miller. Not Norman Mailer.”
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Living with Miller
After living with Miller for the last few days — after rereading The Crucible and After the Fall and a three inch stack of photocopied criticism — I’ve come to one significant conclusion: I don’t like Miller. His early work shows an obvious knack for wrenching every last drop of sentiment and inevitable heartbreak from a tragic narrative, but, damn, they are really unpleasant to read. His language is starving for poetry.
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My Dissertation (in the News)
“A World in Which Everything Hurts,” a profile of Arthur Miller in The Forward, gets bonus points for mentioning, in a single paragraph, three of the authors I’m writing about in my dissertation.
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To Hell with Clinton’s My Life
Christopher Goffard of the St. Petersburg Times interviewed Ross Miller about his upcoming “definitive” biography of Philip Roth and learned about their relationship, which extends more than twenty years and which seems to have been founded on an intellectual kinship.