fieldus

Kakutani tugs on Robert Stone’s beard.

From The New York Times:
Jonathan Lear, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago who is teaching a course with Mr. Coetzee this semester, said: “One of the things he looks at, which other people including myself lack the courage to look at, is human cruelty and insensitivity as it occurs in all sort [...]

As a recent reader of GREAT EXPECTATIONS, it was good to have some articulation of why I enjoyed it as much as I did:
From Jon Michael Varese, writing the Guardian books blog:
“We need to read Dickens’s novels,” she wrote, “because they tell us, in the grandest way possible, why we are what we are.”
There it [...]

David Ulin - the LA Times book editor writes about information overload:
Contemplation is not only possible but necessary, especially in light of all the overload. In her recent essay collection “The Winter Sun” (Graywolf: 196 pp., $15 paper), Fanny Howe quotes Simone Weil: “One must believe in the reality of time. Otherwise one is just [...]

Found this from GK Chesterton after searching for essays on Great Expectations (of which, more to follow).

Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only
redeemed from an utter triviality, surpassing that of naughts and crosses,
by the fact that it describes not the world around us, or the things on the
retina of [...]

Interesting paean to Amy Hempel and the minimalist approach to writing in The LA Times.
To demonstrate minimalism, students sit around Spanbauer’s kitchen table for 10 weeks taking apart The Harvest. The first thing you study is what Tom calls “horses.” The metaphor is — if you drive a wagon from Utah to California, you use [...]

Simon Schama in surprisingly good form wriiting in The FT about Updike and more specifically his last collection of short stories, My Father’s Tears.
But as this last, beguiling collection of stories bears witness, condescending to Updike as the lyricist of small satisfactions misses the power of his great, deep, subject: the pathos of American [...]

Too good to let this pass unremarked - Julian Barnes on the underrated Frank O’Connor in The Spectator. For readers unfamiliar with his work, a good place to start is the classic GUESTS OF THE NATION. Interestingly mangled by Neil Jordan in The Crying Game.
More background information on Frank O’Connor via Michael L Storey’s [...]

An exclusive interview with J M Coetzee - DN.se
On influence
There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind. I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of [...]

New Statesman - Eternal vigilance
He was not, as Lionel Trilling once pointed out, a genius; he was not mysterious; he had served in Burma, washed dishes in a Parisian hotel, and fought for a few months in Spain, but this hardly added up to a life of adventure; for the most part he lived in [...]