[You want to read the earlier installments, and we want to help you: Part 1, Part 2] [Drumming our fingers…
Announcing the Book Club Schedule!
The votes are in, and the winner of the poll for the first book to be discussed in the Big…
“Fat, too, fool, hey?” – The Mind in Morning (Snow in film)
Having just reread William Gass’s “The Pedersen Kid” yesterday morning, I decided to do a study of associations–what my brain…
What do you want to be? Who are you? Now what do you want to be?
Anne K. Yoder recently pointed out this Susan Sontag quote to me (it’s from the opening of her…
Tiny Shocks Revisited (A Continuing Criticism of James Wood’s How Fiction Works)
Earlier today John pointed toward Nigel Beale’s cleverly-titled criticism of my post “Tiny Shocks: Uncovering the Reductive Plot of James…
Art’s Morality (A Reading of William H. Gass’s “The Artist and Society”)
Formalists are often accused of ignoring art’s morality, as well as its other social aspects. (Of course, artists are often…
Tiny Shocks: Uncovering the Reductive Plot of James Wood’s How Fiction Works
[Update: As if this post weren’t long enough, there’s now a Part 2.] On January 22, I read Shya Scanlon’s…
Uncover Your Tracks: A Preliminary Critique of James Wood’s How Fiction Works
Shya posted something two days ago about James Wood’s How Fiction Works, in which Wood advocates the use of “free…