Cancellation, Culture, and Copyright
What separates the Dr. Seuss incident from more recent cancellations is that it has turned into a discussion of copyright terms
Category: Books
Sunday Morning! “The Prisoner” by Marcel Proust
The Prisoner by Marcel Proust’s depiction of doomed and obsessive sexual jealousy is not nearly as bleak as I remembered. It’s tragic, but it’s a light tragedy.
Sunday Morning! “Sodom and Gomorrah” by Marcel Proust (pt. 2)
Proust is showing us the world that was in terminal decline by the first world war and asking the important question: What did we lose?
Sunday Morning! Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust (pt.1)
Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust: In which the love that dare not speak its name finally speaks- at great length.
Sunday Morning! “The Guermantes Way” by Marcel Proust (pt. 2)
We’re halfway through Marcel Proust’s epic The Guermantes Way and Death makes an appearance or two to complicate matters.
Sunday Morning! The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust: On worshipping and serving others in the social world of Volume 3 of “In Search of Lost Time”
Game of Thrones Rewatch: Redemption Song
I decided to look at the concept of fictional redemption arcs in Game of Thrones. In the GoT TV show, there are three main redemptive arcs.
Sunday Morning! Finishing ‘In Search of Lost Time’ Vol. 2. by: Marcel Proust
As we finish Marcel Proust’s “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” our hero heads to the beach and meets an artist, a marquis, and a band of young girls who will alter the course of his life and imagination, whether or not he ever really knows them.
Sunday Morning! “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” by Marcel Proust
In “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” by Marcel Proust, our hero goes through the changes of adolescence, in which he sees things loved from afar close up, and watches their proportions and values shrink or enlarge greatly.
Game of Thrones: Little People, Big World
Quit ignoring The Scope Problem or we’ll end up with more Game of Thrones that start off amazing and end with a disappointed “meh”.
Sunday Morning! “Swann’s Way” by Marcel Proust (Pt 1)
And now, Proust immerses us in his remembered social milieu like a sponge cake in tea, and rhapsodizes about the myriad joys and pains of everyday existence. His young narrator overflows with delight.
Game of Thrones: Murder Your Darlings
George RR Martin kills off his characters right. Those deaths mattered. The TV version of Game of Thrones? Not so much…
New Year’s Fright: “The Apple Tree”
The Apple Tree is an eerie seasonal tale about a widower and a familiar old tree to end the year. Next year, let’s read Proust!
Tradition & Memory: A Child’s Christmas In Wales
A Child’s Christmas in Wales is itself, and in being itself it speaks to variegated experiences beyond its author’s own knowledge.
Re-reading (And Not Reading) James Joyce
I know every single one of you is wondering whether and in what ways I appreciate James Joyce’s work. So…In praise of (and in fear of) James Joyce’s oeuvre.
Sunday Morning! “Lovecraft Country”
Like the recent HBO series, I consumed “Lovecraft Country” ravenously, like I was a dripping protoplasmic monster too terrible to behold.
Sunday Morning! “White Tears” & “Red Pill” by Hari Kunzru
This week I read two novels by Hari Kunzru, a modern magician of storytelling, though the tricks worked better in one of them for my tastes.
We Don’t Need ‘City-Slicker Elegy’
Stop normalizing pathological snobbery, such as “everyone who voted Trump is an inbred, lardlicking oaf ripped from Hillbilly Elegy”
Sunday Morning! “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “Riot Baby”
This week, If Beale Street Could Talk and Riot Baby, two stories, 46 years apart, about young Black men imprisoned, a disturbingly perennial theme
Sunday Morning! “The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa
Pessoa was that modernist type: a tiny man with a limited social life and an unfathomably rich and grandiose imaginary one.
