Damian Flanagan reports (in case you are wondering who Donald Keene is). Also check out Damian’s bio of YM. “The Sea of Fertility,” the leviathan that Mishima left behind, is arguably both the most important Japanese literary work written in the last 100 years and, by far, the least understood. Incorporating ideas from noh theater and…
The game was the thing. One became impatient with non-game happenings—a nurse coming in to empty the urinal. Time disposed itself in short tolerable stretches between the bright beads of the games. The score itself, toted up and announced, had the cheerful workaday effect of a small tidy business. It came to be understood too…
He sat down under the cistern and sniffed a handful of soil. The silence was disjunct. It ran concurrently with one and did not flow from the past. Each passing second was packaged in cottony silence. It had no antecedents. Here was three o’clock but it was not like three o’clock in Mississippi. In Mississippi…
Nice piece especially if one is a Mishima fan and like me one has yet to visit Japan, Japan being one of the very few countries on my travel bucket list: Perhaps this explains why the author Yukio Mishima took his pen name from the city, though the writer claimed that he just happened to be…
This in the New York Post Last year, the Wall Street Journal called the book “the Big Easy slacker’s manual” and recommended it should be given to recent college graduates as “a comic and cautionary lesson in how not to get a job.” a confederacy of duncesJohn Kennedy Toolenew orleansphilosophical literature
When he woke, it was very cold. He lit the propane panel ray and, as he waited for the cabin to warm, caught sight of his own name in Sutter’s casebook. Barrett: His trouble is he wants to know what his trouble is. His “trouble,” he thinks, is a disorder of such a character that…
Walter Isaacson in today’s NYT But Percy’s theory about the redemptive power of hurricanes goes beyond the fact that dangerous situations allow us to become action heroes or saints. “True, people help each other in catastrophes,” he wrote in “Lancelot.” “But they don’t feel good because they help each other. They help each other because…
Suicide considered as consequence of the spirit of abstraction and of transcendence; lewdness as sole portal of reentry into world demoted to immanence; reentry into immanence via orgasm; but post-orgasmic transcendence 7 devils worse than first. Man who falls victim to transcendence as the spirit of abstraction, i.e., elevates self to posture over and against…
Here he used to walk with his father and speak of the galaxies and of the expanding universe and take pleasure in the insignificance of man in the great lonely universe. His father would recite “Dover Beach,” setting his jaw askew and wagging’ his head like F.D.R.: for the world which seems To lie before…
This in The Guardian. (I once had coffee with Elias Canetti at the Coffee Cup in Hampstead). Elias CanettiFranz KafkaMax BrodMetamorphosisphilosophical literature
manwithoutqualities 