From The Telegraph, by Alexander Larman. As per the cover art, the edited book Theology and Geometry is in press. +++++++++ In 1969, the 31-year old, would-be author John Kennedy Toole killed himself. Frustrated and miserable that his magnum opus, a picaresque New Orleans-set comic novel entitled A Confederacy of Dunces, had failed to find a publisher,…
Born on this date. If you appreciate the anarchic A Confederacy of Dunces you may well enjoy Rolfe’s super funny and outrageous novel Hadrian the Seventh. A classic in its own right is A. J. A. Symons’ biography of Rolfe, The Quest For Corvo. Below: Alec McCowen as Hadrian the Seventh, Mermaid Theatre, April 1968 winning his…
and for anyone claiming to be of a cultivated mind. Catholicismjoseph pearcephilosophical literatureWalker Percy
The redoubtable, incisive and subtle Douglas Murray is the only current public intellectual I’ve come across to have read Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. While Murray points to Rezzori’s central psychological insight that anti-Semitism is a form of prestige (i.e. snobbery), I want to add a further complicating wrinkle to the discussion. That is,…
Born on June 8th. Becoming the Emperor: How Marguerite Yourcenar reinvented the past. Then she came upon the drafts of a novel about Hadrian that she had begun when she was twenty-one and had later put aside. …. She was forty-five when she went back to Hadrian. Marcus AureliusMarguerite YourcenarMemoirs of Hadrianphilosophical literatureYukio Mishima
Charles Sanders Peirceexistentialismphenomenologyphilosophical literaturePhilosophy of LanguagePhilosophy of PlacesemioticsWalker Percy
My favourite Kafka story improbably realized as an opera. But since it’s Glass, it’s not that much of a surprise. As is the case these days, things are vulgarized by the obligatory push for “relevance”. Ho-hum! Franz KafkaIn the Penal ColonyJeff JanisheskioperaPhilip Glassphilosophical literature
