Going back to 1985, Roger Kimball reviews a collection of conversations with Walker Percy. Mr. Percy’s chief concern as a novelist is with ”the dislocation of man in the modern age,” with the sense of ennui and meaninglessness that has shadowed so many lives, even – or perhaps especially – in the midst of affluence.…
A nice and recent piece on the Rolfe-Symons entanglement, a follow up to the last post. Symons Said; On the trail of a strange, elusive life in literature. Michael Dirda, The Weekly Standard, Vol. 18 No. 14 My quest for Symons A.J.A. Symons, that is began when, many years ago, I first read that strange novel Hadrian…
Given a papal change is underway, Rolf’s Hadrian the Seventh is as timely as ever, and in my view happens to be one of the top five novels of the 20th Century. Here is David Bradshaw’s reliable Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry. Part and parcel of the Corvo legend is Symons’ classic biography of Corvo, Corvo brought to Symons’…
I want to give a plug to the superb biography on JK Toole written by Cory MacLauchlin. He brilliantly marshals the Toole story into a plausible and coherent whole given that much of what we know was severely modulated through Thelma Toole and who along with Robert Gottlieb tend to be cast (for different reasons) as the…
Few offer as balanced a scholarly assessment of “Dunces” and Toole than Vernon Leighton, Cory MacLauchlin and Robert Rudnicki. The three must surely be the first port of call for those engaged in Toole related research. Here is Leighton’s blog and here is a collection of his articles. Toole’s biographer Cory MacLauchlin has presented a fine exemplar the art of…
Here is a documentary film John Kennedy Toole: the omega point freely available to view. The subject matter, the greatest American novel of the 20th Century putting Toole (IMHO) up there with novelists of the order of Kafka, Musil, and Mann – and that based on one work alone. Here is the excellent blog run by JKT’s…
H/T to a kindred spirit “Infrequent literary reflections by an analytic philosopher” for bringing the slowly but surely growing secondary literature to my attention. Since it was through Kafka that my latent philosophical impulse was first generated, I’ve always wanted to write a piece on some aspect of his work. I have however been granted…
Simon Critchley in The New York Times. See Leiter’s critical take on Critchley.
A short interview with Mrs. Steven Pinker.
I came across this nice article by Ted Gioia entitled Exhuming Robert Musil: A Fresh Look at The Man Without Qualities. Here is an excerpt: The Man Without Qualities depicts a strange world in which a couple is given a copy of Nietzsche as a wedding gift, a murderer on death row spends his days…
manwithoutqualities 