In his review of Melissa Hobrook Pierson’s The Place You Love is Gone (Progress Took It Away) (a book given to such observations as, “Change is a violation of personal laws,” and “‘Progress’ is just another word for larceny”), Anthony Swofford observes of Pierson that “change, again,” is “this author’s silent enemy.” Change is, of… — read more

The second half of Harold Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, his meditation on the figure of Yahweh, has as one of its touchstones Bloom’s insight that the title character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the only character in Western literature that we can believe is capable of writing the work in which he appears.… — read more

I’ve read the first half of Harold Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, his meditation on the figure of Jesus, and found him at his incisive, dyspeptic best in his critique of what he finds in the New Testament that’s not Jesus: For Paul, the Resurrection, or Christ event, proclaimed the death of Torah:… — read more

Harold Bloom has recently published Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, which I’ve purchased, but haven’t read. Jonathan Rosen’s review in Sunday’s New York Times (forgive me, I’m still catching up from my week away) suggests that it’s as fascinating as I had hoped it would be when I got it. It focuses on the… — read more

In order to boost available content, America Online is preparing to offer downloads of old television programs like Welcome Back, Kotter and Chico And The Man. What do you think? Jesse Glass, Machinist “Ah, the memories. Nothing says ‘My parents are getting divorced’ like the Kotter theme song.” That about sums it up. — read more

The word “Orwellian” is grossly overused in public discourse, but here’s one case where no other word will do. I fully expect a videotape to be released by the White House within the next couple of days in which Scott McClellan can be clearly heard to say “I don’t think that’s accurate.” I would imagine… — read more

In Dark Star Safari, his extraordinary account of a trip he made by boat, bus, and train from Cairo to Cape Town, Paul Theroux returns to Malawi, a country in which he served in the Peace Corps in the 1960s. He finds the country, as he finds much of the eastern portion of Africa through… — read more

The specter of incivility, currently threatening so much of our media and other shared culture, seems recently to be making alarming inroads in the pages of the New York Times Book Review. Last week, there was this in Clive James’s review of Elias Canetti’s Party in the Blitz: The translator, Michael Hofmann, has found all… — read more

The reading group I’m in is wrapping up its reading for this year, so at our last meeting, we had a discussion of what we’d like to read next year. Someone suggested that we spend next year reading James Joyce‘s Ulysses. Though it is a long and difficult book (if not as difficult as popularly… — read more

I’m becoming a fan of Michael Silverblatt‘s Bookworm podcast. His guests tend to run the gamut of writers of contemporary literary fiction, which is to say that some are more interesting than others. It’s Silverblatt himself who makes the interviews consistently interesting, regardless of the guest. He talks a lot, which usually isn’t very effective… — read more