Desperately Seeking Sam      

        I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without  having left a stain upon the silence. –Samuel Beckett

        The first and last time I saw Samuel Beckett, he was walking down a Paris street, the Rue Rémy Dumoncel. At least, I think it was Beckett. The height was right; the near-skeletal thinness was right; the location was right—near the nursing home where he died not long after. I think he wa...

To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.
Cheers for now. 

As I prepare to travel from sunny Texas to the snowy Northeast, to teach a seminar and give a reading from my works at the esteemed Western Connecticut State University (venue of the nation’s only MFA course in Professional Writing) in historic and picturesque Danbury, former hat-making center and chief town of bucolic Fairfield County, I leave my readers, such as they are, with vital info gleaned from the local Chamber of Commerce website. These dry data will have to do until first-hand ex...

Fröhliches Weihnachten

Navidad Alegre

Buon Natale

Joyeux Noël

С Рождеством Христовым

I'm always surprised by how many educated, middle-class people I know who have traveled less than, say, your average Victorian pastor, who made it a point of making at least one pilgrimage to the Holy Land in his lifetime, to return with magic-lantern slides of the Dome of the Rock and Gethsemane with a few fleabitten camels standing about in the background. One thinks also of the traditional Grand Tour of the 18th and 19th centuries, embarked upon by college graduates and society debutante...

John McGahern, author of the novels Among Women, The Pornographer, and The Dark (the last of which which was banned in the know-nothing, Church-suffocated Ireland of the early '60s), as well as numerous Chekhovian short stories and the crystalline memoir All Will Be Well, died in '06 and was memorialized widely, including here, by me. Truly, the Ireland he grew up in was very much the obscurantist, repressed place Joyce describes in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man; and that McGahern...

      It was in the ordinary decencies–drink, food, conversation–that Samuel Beckett believed, and in little else, apart from Art, his one true religion. In this personal church he was a staunch conservative. His saints were Dante, Racine, Rembrandt, Schubert, Schopenhauer, and that other melancholy Samuel, Dr. Johnson, who obsessed him all his life (interestingly, pre-Godot, he wrote part of a play about Dr. Johnson in which the great man is awaited but never appears). Lesser saint...

John Updike, who died last January, was a man of many interests and broad horizons: novelist, art critic, short-story writer, poet, and, up to a point, car guy—or should I say, automotive esthete. Not for him the oil-stained T-shirt and under-the-hood exertions of a weekend. He couldn’t have cared less about the 0-60 time or highway mpg of a car. Nevertheless, as he says in Due Considerations, his last collect...

Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh 
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) 

Über allen Gipfeln 
Ist Ruh, 
In allen Wipfeln 
Spürest du 
Kaum einen Hauch; 
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. 
Warte nur, balde 
Ruhest du auch. 

As a firm believer that there's nothing new under the sun, I've been racking my brains to come up with a historical parallel to the sudden rise of Sarah Palin, and I think I've got one. Ever heard of Pierre Poujade? Few have today. but he was once famous enough to appear on the cover of TIME magazine and be spoken of as a potential prime minister of France.

The parallel, like all such historical analogies, is far from exact, but it may be briefly illuminating. Poujade was born in the sm...

VLADIMIR: Moron!

ESTRAGON: Vermin!

VLADIMIR: Abortion!

ESTRAGON: Morpion!

VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat!

ESTRAGON: Curate!

VLADIMIR: Cretin!

ESTRAGON (with finality): CRRITIC!

VLADIMIR: Oh!

He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.

                                             Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

On St Patrick's Day, 1943, the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Eamon de Valera, father of the Irish free State, one-time radical republican and founder of Fianna Fàil (still Ireland's largest party), broadcast a radio speech to the nation in which he outlined his vision of post-war Ireland as "a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic y...

Plot, one might say, is the chronological sequence of events in a story, and the story itself is how, and in what style, those events are revealed to the reader. Harry Rowohlt, the German critic, author, and translator (and translator of my books), says that plot is the least necessary element of a good book, and cites my work as an example: "Sex, Gott, Alkohol und Irland, wenn das nicht Handlung genug ist," says Harry, re: the Killoyle trilogy ("sex, God, alcohol, and Ireland, if the plot ...

The Nobel prizewinning Danish physicist Niels Bohr (above, with an unnamed colleague) kept a horseshoe nailed to the wall above his desk and, when asked whether he believed it would bring him luck, replied: “Not at all. I am scarcely likely to believe in such nonsense. However, I am told that a horseshoe will bring you luck whether you believe in it or not.”

The OuLiPo, or Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau (above, avec chien) and François Le Lionnais. The group's initiatory text was a sequence of ten sonnets written by Queneau entitled Cent mille milliards de poèmes: these sonnets all use the same rhymes, and are grammatically constructed so that any line in any sonnet can be replaced by the corresponding line in any of the other nine sonnets. Each sonnet in the original edition was cut into 14 strips...