Anecdotal Evidence

Some years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called MGUS (pronounced EM -gus) -- monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance. It’...

“It happened to me last year to lose my home with all contents in a night of that phenomenon that we oddly called blitz , though why we shou...

“I have a dreamy way of withdrawing into myself, and, besides, a dull and childish ignorance of many common things.”   Among the most rewa...

How often have you encountered a poem or other piece of writing that not only provoked astonishment on first reading but continues to do so ...

Czesław Miłosz wrote “In Warsaw” in 1945, shortly after the end of World War II: “I did not want to love so. That was not my design. ...

Perhaps it’s age but I find growing satisfaction in resolution. I like stories that conclude satisfyingly, often ending where they started, ...

The feuilleton is an attractively flexible form, part journalism, part essay, that has seldom successfully crossed the Atlantic. The name i...

Charles Lamb in a letter to his childhood friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge on October 30, 1809:   “I have put up shelves. You never saw a bo...

J.J. Kimche writes in his most recent edition of The Jew from Nowhere, “Who Shall Sway Over the Trees?”:   “One of the abiding oddities o...

" Literature is insight and synthesis, which means that poetry, ultimately, is heroic. Naked, weak, hungry, trembling, endangered by al...

“Anyone who says the artist’s field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. . . . You a...

I often think about the continuity of personality. Not in the abstract sense, as an academic exercise in human psychology. Rather, as an asp...

The Crimean War (1854-56) is remembered in the West for being the first photographically documented major conflict and for Tennyson’s barnbu...

Marius Kociejowski has written to tell me the poet, critic, translator, Islamic scholar and voluptuary of sound Eric Ormsby has died, appare...

Among humans, complaining is always annoying. Short of murder, rape, theft and treason, it may be our most detestable quality. A complainer ...

  This blog has been around for more than twenty years and I could easily devote the next twenty to replying to the complaints I often recei...

“It was wonderful luck for me that I should have worked with Yvor Winters. at this particular stage of my life, rather than earlier, when I ...