October 8, 2013
The Endgame and the Spin
In all high-minded or “holy” group violence, you’ll see two factors at play: The Endgame and the Spin. (Which one of these two gets emphasized and reviled depends on […]
October 7, 2013
A Note on Realism
The realist novel, for reasons I’m still figuring out, gains in power from a certain excess and messiness. This is why Chekhov and Turgenev write excellent novels, but nothing […]
October 7, 2013
Literature and the Loss of Confidence
Mathematicians have been asserting, since Pythagoras, how number underpins all of nature. The discipline of physics has spawned an entire speculative cosmogony that strives to discredit and replace Genesis. Religious […]
September 24, 2013
Against Histrionics: On Deaths and Afterlives
Compare the deaths of Socrates and Christ: They mirror each other in the setup (thinker put to death for subversion of the established order), but Christ’s death is physically painful […]
September 16, 2013
“The Authoress of the Odyssey”
Was the Odyssey written by a woman? The theory has been raised in the past—and long before the rise of late 20th-century feminism, which is when, historically, you’d expect […]
September 14, 2013
Genius and Unpredictability
We all know that which book or author “takes off” and which one doesn’t is, at least in part, a matter of chance. The process by which large numbers of […]
September 9, 2013
Human Beings Writing about Human Beings
I am, I am told, an “Indian-American” writer, and my novels are Indian-American novels. Sometimes they’re called “immigrant fiction,” even though I’ve never immigrated from or to anywhere. My […]
September 2, 2013
Drug Culture and the Nature of an Elect
To “open the doors of perception,” to recognize the futility of getting and spending and focus on experiencing the moment, to access superhuman reserves of strength or love—such are […]
August 25, 2013
The Nature of Authority
A book describing the afterlife has been on the bestseller lists for some time, a first-person account by a neurosurgeon. It’s one of those books I’ve read reviews of, but […]
August 22, 2013
Brief Guide to the Backs of Poetry Books
Here’s what you need to interpret the mysterious coded language on the backs of poetry books. 1. Watch out for eclecticism and egalitarianism promised through the high-culture/pop-culture mashup. In the […]
August 19, 2013
The Projection of Personality
The tightness or rightness of sentences, images, metaphors, the snapping-together of word and word, phrase and phrase—in other words, the stylistic elements writers spend years perfecting—are useless without the supreme […]
August 18, 2013
Video Games and Religion
A worldwide majority of people have claimed, for centuries, that they believe in, and want to go to, heaven. Whether heaven exists has always been a matter of debate, but […]