Difficult (And Loving It)

This week, one of my classes wandered into meta-territory, the domain where you are no longer talking about this book and begin talking about writing, reading, thinking.
The specific spur was the previous night’s assignment, the twenty-second and twenty-third chapters of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. If you’ve read the book you would [...]

Only Connect

Occasionally students ask, “What’s your favorite book?” They might ask without meaning it—desperately hoping for digression—so I respond without elaboration. It’s an answer I’m too lazy to revise, like my favorite color…purple.
Like most avid readers, my favorite shifts periodically, and, if I’m on a lucky streak, I say it’s the [...]

Writers I Admire: Spalding Gray

Beginning with misgivings has to be a bad idea, but I wonder if I have the right title for this post—is Spalding Gray a writer or an actor?
I associate the performance artist responsible for Swimming to Cambodia, Gray’s Anatomy, Monster in a Box—and others—with his notebook. I picture him [...]

A Different Tuning

I own one book I’d truly grieve losing, D’Après Tout by Jean Follain.
My reasons are partly sentimental—I went to great trouble to get the book, and it found me when I felt lost in my writing life. Most of all though, the poems inside are ones I wish I’d [...]

Living Below the Surface

Sometimes I magically encounter books just when they resonate with me most.
I’ve just finished Stoner by John Williams, originally published in 1965 but recently reprinted by New York Review Books’ Classics Series. What attracted me to the novel in the first place was an essay about Williams included in The [...]

Writers I Admire: Neil Postman

A passage from Technopoly (Knopf, 1992):
Now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress…We proceed under [...]

An Unreviewerly Review: The Tourists

Reviewers’ chutzpah often astounds me. Even with no book, song, movie, or major work of art to their credit, reviewers stand ready to assess a work’s every moment and facet, every creative choice. No uncertain review ever traveled far. Reviews just won’t allow much ambivalence or, for that matter, warmth. [...]