Sports Saturday
This past week my novelist friend Rachel Kranz was visiting after having busted out of the World Series of Poker tournament in Las Vegas. She made it to Day 4 (out of 9), which was pretty good considering that she has only been playing for three years. Still she was upset, as good competitors [...]
Noh mask Shishiguchi
A psychologist, a religious studies professor, a novelist, an English professor, and two educators are in a room talking about the nature of evil. And the religious studies professor says . . .
Actually, this is not a joke but the composition of a dinner party we hosted three nights ago. One of the topics [...]
Balthus
My friend Rachel Kranz, author of the novel Leaps of Faith, is visiting us at the moment, and we were talking about the number of times that people approach her about writing a book about their lives. As they envision it, they will tell her their stories and she will write them up.
We talked about [...]
Rachel Kranz
My novelist friend Rachel Kranz is currently in Maine campaigning with gay friends to save same-sex marriage against attempts to ban it. I mention this because her first novel, Leaps of Faith, is the most intelligent fictional exploration of same-sex marriage that I know.
Among the differences between politics and fiction is the fact that [...]
Georgia O’Keefe
This past week I seem to have taken as a challenge Elaine Scarry’s observation (in The Body in Pain) that representations of physical pain in literature are rare. Two more I add to the list are the Blake professor in Gail Godwin’s The Good Husband, who is dying of cancer, and Rosie, the stressed-out [...]
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
What have I learned about literature and pain this past week? First, that writers have taken up the topic, just as they take up every aspect of human existence. They imagine what it is like to feel pain and, through poetic images and fictional stories, convey that experience to readers. By entering into [...]
Posted in Pain, Suffering, death of a child | Also tagged Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christopher Marlowe, death of a child, Death of Ivan Ilych, Doctor Faustus, Heart of Darkness, In Memoriam, John Milton, Joseph Conrad, Leo Tolstoy, Name of the Rose, Pain, Paradise Lost, Suffering, Umberto Eco |
My friend Rachel Kranz and I have been talking and e-mailing about the value of novel reading, always a useful topic to revisit. Rachel is as thoughtful as anyone I know on the subject—she is a novelist as well as a novel reader so she has a double perspective. Leaps of Faith (Farrar Straus, 2000), [...]
