These links are kosher for Passover! (No, they’re not.) Just click “more”!
Thank gosh! I was afraid Jews were becoming underrepresented in contemporary American literature!
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Adam McKay’s elegy for the Anchorman!
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Roger Ebert’s elegy for the newspaperman!
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If Hugh Laurie won’t do it, get Richard E. Grant!
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Jim Cramer: still doin’ his thing.
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Otis Shepard: artist for the House of Wrigley.
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Nebraska used to be my favorite Springsteen album. I’m a lot happier now. (Psst! You’re misreading the giddiness of “Open All Night”! This New Jersey in the morning really is like a lunar landscape!)
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Thymos keeps hot guys hot and cool guys cool, but European lit is lit by its absence.
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The seder and international relations.
It is such a complete example of wish fulfillment as to make the reader suspect that McEwan is being deliberately, teasingly perverse.
By that logic, Gilliam should have welcomed the “perverse” studio cut of Brazil.
Seriously, great essay. Sebald is one of my 0-fers, and Kirsch doesn’t really help me with him; I’m trying not to remain/become an exemplar of Kirsch’s caricature of Sebald’s worldview. On the other hand, not too long ago I read Roth’s Radetzky March, and I’m sure there’s lots of room for comparison.
I’ve only read Sebald’s posthumous On the Natural History of Destruction
, which I enjoyed. It doesn’t sound very much in the spirit of the book that Kirsch cites, but some smart people I know and trust like his work.
I read that McEwan book
and also thought the poem-twist was kinda insane, but I’ve never been a Matthew Arnold fan.
Any take on Houellebecq? He’s an 0-fer for me.
They’re all 0-fers for me, but Sebald is someone I “should have” read, not just because he’s a chronicler of loss but because I recently undertook to establish that each and every instance of strategic bombing has been a (Kantian) war crime.
I’ve never been a Matthew Arnold fan.
Man up and get some thymos, dude.