Woody Allen is not large, but he contains multitudes, and some of them show up in his “controversial” autobiography, Apropos of Nothing, which the powers of righteous wokitude finally allowed to be published back in 2020, which I got around to reading in 2021 and am now “reviewing” in 2022. I have read many autobiographies,…
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The Billiard Ball Causality of Francis Fukuyama, Together With Other Considerations
I have recently finished reading Francis Fukuyama’s excellent book, Identity The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, published back in 2018, trying to explain why the world isn’t behaving the way Francis and I think it ought, and not doing a bad job of it at all. I’ve written round and about Dr….
The Literary Offenses of William Faulkner
(Author’s note: Easily the greatest piece of literary criticism in American letters is Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”, though I believe Mark might have titled it more euphoniously. My piece takes a much more somber hue than Mark’s, exploring, to be blunt, Faulkner’s frequent failure to free himself emotionally from the limitations of his…
Saints preserve us! And, while you’re at it, preserve us from the saints!
Sick of the woke folk? Well, I sure am, but I’m sick of the unwoke too. This is a bit of an unbalanced rant, going off in several different directions at once, occasioned by three pieces by three ill-assorted unconventional (I guess) conservatives, Ross Douthat’s Where Liberal Power Lies, Rod Dreher’s commentary on Ross’s piece,…
Paul Krugman: A limousine liberal takes a walk
In his latest newsletter, which, as I keep repeating, is in itself a refutation of Friedmanite “No Free Lunch” gospel, Paul Krugman takes us on a walking tour of the Big Apple, beginning with this paragraph: Full disclosure: I’m one of those privileged New Yorkers who decamped to the suburbs during the worst of the…
Who the HELL does Robert Gottlieb think he is?
Robert Gottlieb is a serious high muckety-muck in the New York literary scene, formerly editor in chief, no less, of, successively, Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and the New Yorker. So why is he pissing on poor old Booth Tarkington? In fact, much of Bob’s take on Booth over at the New Yorker, “The…
Uh, so I guess it was just LARGELY about the Benjamins
Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, which I did not know really still existed, had an impressive article by Nathan Thrall, “How the Battle Over Israel and Anti-Semitism Is Fracturing American Politics”, which, shockingly enough, confirms about half of what the notorious Ilhan Omar had to say about Jews, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee…
Sphericity
Thelonious Sphere Monk probably did not drink as much bourbon as William Faulkner. He probably did not shoot as much heroin as William Burroughs, or smoke as much marijuana as Norman Mailer, or get as many “vitamin shots” from feel-good Manhattan doctors as John F. Kennedy. But he had his share. He had his measure….
Sweeping up a few Republican crumbs
Okay, that’s a bit harsh, even though, let’s face it, a lot of Republicans are crumbs. A week or two ago, I ran a piece, “John McCain, Paul Ryan, and the Myth of the Virtuous Republican”, in the course of which I quoted fairly extensively from two often interesting “I’m outta here” books by (more…
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Articles of Lasting Interest: Jazz: I post a jazz video every week, usually but not necessarily featuring a performance of a composition of Thelonious Monk. These videos can be accessed as a group here. “Harvard douchebaggery not exclusively a left-wing phenomenon, study reveals” is an unfriendly take on Harvard Professor Robert Barro’s disingenuous claim that…