Category Archives: Uncategorized

Only the Lonely

  ONLY THE LONELY: Loneliness, the fuel of American fiction, as explored in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.   David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest covers a lot of space in the universe of human consciousness, but loneliness is its domicile.  Specifically the empty brand of lonelinessContinue reading “Only the Lonely”

Fiction as Man and Man as Fiction

               AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A Self-Recorded Fiction can be found in John Barth’s 1968 collection Lost in the Funhouse.  It is a philosophical imagining of a piece of fiction having the human qualities of shame, hope, fear, and disappointment as held in the complicated relationship between parent and child, and concurrently an exploration of those complicated feelingsContinue reading “Fiction as Man and Man as Fiction”

We Belong Together

You’re always going to fear appropriating someone else’s something else when creating, but that’s just one of myriad fears that conspire to discourage creativity.  You have to create in the face of everything.  That’s where the beauty of doing it resides, in not letting fear and negativity extinguish the flame searching for meaning, drawn toContinue reading “We Belong Together”

Todd Haynes’ Carol

I saw Todd Haynes’ Carol this afternoon, a bitterly cold day, snow falling softly as I left the theater, apropos for a film set in the winter of 1952-53, featuring one of the most beautiful snow scenes I’ve ever seen, Rooney Mara’s Therese taking photographs of Cate Blanchett’s Carol in the midst of falling snow.  Whatever elseContinue reading “Todd Haynes’ Carol”