A Commonplace Blog: J. F. Powers and Elmore Leonard
My review of Katherine A. Powers’s edition of her father’s letters, Suitable Accommodations , appeared yesterday—publication day for the bo...| dgmyers.blogspot.com
My review of Katherine A. Powers’s edition of her father’s letters, Suitable Accommodations , appeared yesterday—publication day for the bo...| dgmyers.blogspot.com
A transcript of my remarks at Congregation Torat Emet in Bexley, Ohio, on July 17. 2014.| A Commonplace Blog
Note: Last night my synagogue, Congregation Torat Emet in Bexley, Ohio, held a tribute in my honor. Several friends spoke, and several more friends, who could not attend the evening, wrote small things about me. The most unique—far and away the most amusing—was written by my former student Michael Schaub, one of the best young literary critics in the country. A regular contributor to NPR whose work has also appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicl...| A Commonplace Blog
New York Post critic Kyle Smith’s series over at PJ Media on the best films of the decades has been entertaining to follow, especially when you disagree with the choices. Smith’s latest, an inventory of the best films of the ’forties from Double Indemnity (#10) to Citizen Kane (#1), got me to thinking. What are the best novels of the ’forties?—a decade that lies just outside my critical expertise. What follows is a preliminary listing: not a ranked order, but a chronological one.| A Commonplace Blog
Cross-posted from Elder of Ziyon| A Commonplace Blog
My third Good Letters post for the Image Journal is up this morning. It is a reflection on living with terminal cancer, as I have for the past six-and-a-half years. The theme of the post is also the theme of my book in progress, Life on Planet Cancer. My oncologist tells me that most patients collapse upon being being diagnosed, sinking into resignation and despair, but while I have discovered small goodness in cancer, I have learned to live with it—have learned that you can still have a li...| A Commonplace Blog
My first post for the Image Journal’s Good Letters blog, which I have joined as a regular contributor, is up this morning. It is an attack on the vulgar understanding of religion as the experience of transcendence. I prefer what William James dismisses as religion’s “dull habit.”| A Commonplace Blog
My seven-year-old son Isaac was listening to Gil Roth’s interview with me on the Virtual Memories Show. “He will be dead from prostate cancer within the next two years,” Roth said in introducing me. “You’re dying?” Isaac cried. Isaac is named after Isaac Rosenfeld, of whom the critic Ted Solotaroff said that “his very name itself still seems to possess an incantatory power: some of his friends speak it as though ‘Isaac’ were a magic word for joy and wit. . . .” My son to...| A Commonplace Blog
In English-language prose fiction, that is. Here without much further ado or explanation is the list of the twenty-five greatest literary debuts, which I posted to Twitter earlier today. John Wilson of Books and Culture asked me to put the list in one place, and so.| A Commonplace Blog
You might say that my bibliography of ’sixties fiction has been a lifetime in the making. The first hardback book that I ever bought with my own money was Allen Drury’s 1968 novel Preserve and Protect, the fourth and last volume of the tetralogy about American politics that Drury had begun with his Pulitzer Prize-winning Advise and Consent. (Spoiler: Drury never duplicated the mastery of that first volume.)| A Commonplace Blog
Among the distempers of learning in our day is the habit of reading canonical fiction as if it were the only fiction in existence. In the recent n+1 pamphlet No Regrets, for example, the blogger and novelist Emily Gould complains about the “midcentury misogynists”—Bellow, Kerouac, Mailer, Roth, Updike—who populate what Amanda Hess describes in Slate as the “hypermasculine literary canon.”| A Commonplace Blog
A season into my sixth year of living with Stage IV metastatic prostate cancer, I am finally writing a book on the experience. Or, rather, what began as a wider-ranging memoir has refocused itself as a cancer book. My working title is Life on Planet Cancer (© the author). A literary critic by profession, I will be including some glances at the very best cancer writing. Where, then, if I were advising readers, would I begin on the literature?| A Commonplace Blog
Will Wilkinson laments the decline of “old school blogging,” the original style of blogging—before the media outlets launched their group blogs and bought up the first-generation “personal bloggers”—in which the blogger composed a self, day by day, “put[ting] things out there, broadcast[ing] bits of [his] mind,” and in return finding a place for himself “as a node in the social world.”| A Commonplace Blog
A few days ago, the economist Thomas Sowell found himself obligated to write an op-ed column in which he pointed out that “trickle-down economics”—the economic policy of the political right, according to the political left—is non-existent. It is attacked widely on the left, Sowell observed, but “none of those who denounce a ‘trickle-down’ theory can quote anybody who actually advocated it.”| A Commonplace Blog
Tomorrow I will step into a classroom to begin the last semester of a 24-year teaching career. Don’t get me wrong. I am not retiring. I am not “burned out.” The truth is rather more banal. Ohio State University will not be renewing my three-year contract when it expires in the spring. The problem is tenure: with another three-year contract, I would become eligible for tenure. In an era of tight budgets, there is neither money nor place for a 61-year-old white male professor who has neve...| A Commonplace Blog
Victor Brombert, Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 188 pages.| A Commonplace Blog
Sunday was the fifth anniversary of this Commonplace Blog. My very first post, appropriately enough given my sworn allegiance to him, was a review of Philip Roth. Few people read it, although I was happy and relieved to publish it here.| A Commonplace Blog
Yesterday the Powerline blog—a politically conservative blog out of the Twin Cities—linked to my essay on Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather. Over a thousand first-time readers descended upon A Commonplace Blog, although few lingered long enough to poke around in the remains of my literary thought. One who did was the photographer and printmaker William Porter, who had been a classics scholar in another life. From 1979 to 1982, he had held a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in Renaissance s...| A Commonplace Blog
The reshaping of American literary culture from the early 1950’s to the early 1970’s might be captured in one historical image. James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, the massive blockbuster about the Regular Army in the last months before Pearl Harbor, was awarded the 1952 National Book Award in fiction. Not quite two decades later, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather was not even nominated. Joyce Carol Oates was honored for Them, her long aimless narrative of poor whites adrift in riot-torn De...| A Commonplace Blog
Alice Munro became the first writer whose reputation derives almost exclusively from short stories—and the first Canadian—to win the Nobel Prize in literature.| A Commonplace Blog
“He most honors my style,” Whitman wrote in Song of Myself, “who learns under it to destroy the teacher.” The best thing about teaching is not merely the company of young minds, but the opportunity to be instructed by them. In my class at the Ohio State University on The Great Gatsby and the art of criticism, I have repeatedly (and, I’m afraid, rather tiresomely) denounced the the commonplace interpretation, advanced by nearly every English teacher across the dark fields of this rep...| A Commonplace Blog
Anyone who has ever read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which used to be pretty much every boy in America, remembers the scene in which Tom, Huck, and Joe Harper attend their own funeral:As the service proceeded, the clergyman drew such pictures of the graces, the winning ways, and the rare promise of the lost lads that every soul there, thinking he recognized these pictures, felt a pang in remembering that he had persistently blinded himself to them always before, and had as persistently seen...| A Commonplace Blog
Baz Luhrmann substitutes a high-school English paper for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel in scripting his film version of The Great Gatsby, released earlier this year and now available on DVD from Warner Home Video. The conflict between “old money” and “new money” and the symbolism of T. J. Eckleburg’s eyes as the “eyes of God,” those English-class favorites, are carefully enunciated and repeated by the actors just in case an unwary moviegoer might be under the illusion that Luhr...| A Commonplace Blog
The discussion of The Great Gatsby begins today in my course on it—an entire course devoted to a 180-page book—and in rereading it, I was struck for the first time by the apparent irrelevance of the opening paragraphs. You’ll remember them. Nick Carraway, who has not yet divulged his name, quotes advice from this father, warning him, in much the same way the Los Angeles Review of Bookswarns reviewers of first-time authors, not to say anything if he can’t say something nice. Nick refle...| A Commonplace Blog
Dear All,| dgmyers.blogspot.com
I’ve compiled so many list of best books—best Jewish books, best New York books, best baseball books, best Reagan books, best literary histo...| dgmyers.blogspot.com
