In the San Francisco Chronicle, Alan Greenblatt calls attention to bloggers’ habitual “too busy to blog” excuses. He highlights offenders like James Wolcott, Alex Ross, Terry Teachout, Roger Simon, and me. (He’s right, of course. I just can’t shut up about my bad teeth.) Greenblatt said “habitual excuse notes” bugged him: until I realized that blogs perform much the same . . .
At the University of Florida, where I went to school, you don’t find many dedicated writers in undergraduate creative writing classes. In fact, you don’t meet many liberal arts majors there who are interested in doing too much more than getting laid, partaking of the local weed, trying to make a $150 paycheck cover a month’s worth of meals (supplemented . . .
Ignoring a vile and deceptive political book won’t stop its rise on the bestseller charts, Dahlia Lithwick rightly observes — particularly not when the book is being pimped by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Fox News. Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America has been brought to us by the same abhorrent organization that published Unfit for . . .
A diary kept by Yukio Mishima in the 1940’s, now on display at a museum in Japan, suggests that the Japanese writer based his most famous work partly on his own experiences: Mishima described in detail his efforts to become a novelist, his relations with another famous novelist, Osamu Dazai, and his reunion with a woman believed to be the . . .
John Berger (Ways of Seeing) has returned to London for a month-long celebration of his work. In an interview at the Guardian, he tosses out this observation on shared smoke breaks: ‘A cigarette’, he says, inhaling deeply, ‘is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared you are . . .