Books
The essential task of the critic is not to like or dislike the arts or to push bromides, such as to celebrate the “power of reading.” Despite some troublesome modifications, Lionel Trilling carries on the mission of E.A. Poe and Henry James: he articulates the value of the serious act of judgment in a culture hostile to it.
As the year nears its end, time is running out to write at length about some of the new books that gave me pleasure. Thus this quick list of favorites. As usual, my taste runs to prose that’s off-the-beaten-path.
There is no way that The Arts Fuse was going to miss celebrating the 100th birthday of one of the greatest satirists of the 20th century — Irish genius Flann O’Brien.
No doubt too much can be made out of Steve Jobs’s tripped-out youth, but also, too little. Jobs himself said: “Definitely, taking LSD is one of the most important things in my life.” He never recanted when it came to psychedelics, or disowned their influence.
Is it true that if I love my neighbor I can, or will, like myself? This question cuts to the heart of the poems in Heni Cole’s volume “Touch,” and the answer is yes.
Ben Jonson is one of the great unknown geniuses of the English theater and of western literature. Ian Donaldson’s new biography of the playwright/poet successfully makes the case that he deserves to be better known.
For all of his claims to being a subversive termite, Jonathan Lethem the puffy white elephant appears more often in this collection, trudging down a much safer, much happier road — leave the negativity to the snotty aristocrats.
Mahmoud Darwish, who died in 2008 at the age of sixty-seven, was best and heroically known for his complex perspective on political and spiritual borders — as both a poet and a spokesman for his Palestinian people.
The play does not address Hannah Arendt’s rationalizations or the reasons for her dedication to Martin Heidegger, though the dramatist’s title hints that it is the banal truth of the irrationality of love.
Losing It” explores growing old through an assemblage of tales and lessons drawn from works of the past—the Icelandic Sagas, the classics, the Bible, the Torah—to which the author adds a plenitude of his own dicta and pensées, slinging the whole contraption together on a webbing of extrapolation and free association.
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