Matter Notes: A lawyer's private notes on a legal matter; considered inviolate and non-disclosable.
By metaphor and game, my occasional blog posts on the war on the humanities and other cultural atrocities;
with frequent diversions into creative matters.
In both cases, a form of work product. Scribere est agere.
I haven’t posted lately. My law practice is busy, and when I have free time I usually choose fiction writing over blog writing. All writers have this devil’s choice – use your good hours to create, or use them to promote what you create. Many writers, particularly those who have a time-intensive day job, have […]
First, Tim Parks’s translation of Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is unspeakably brilliant and remains for me, nearly twenty years after its publication, as close to a religious experience as I’ve ever had. Second, Mr. Parks’s latest piece in The New York Review of Books, “The Writer’s Job,” is dead-on right, except […]
Nevertheless, this Weekly Standard piece by Roger Kimball is worth reading. In “The Great American Novel: Will there ever be another?” Kimball argues that the novel has lost its former cultural relevance in part because the “character of culture” has changed. I happen to agree. I don’t happen to care. The novel went the way […]
Yes, I know it’s the Huffington Post. But this gem caught my attention, from a truly bizarre article called “12 Books You NEED on Your Bookshelf”: But if you’re going to buy hard covers with at least one eye on the opinions of visiting friends and relatives, these are our choices of the titles you […]
A waitress in a local coffee shop was complaining to me and everyone else about being 47. Her body aches with middle age. Her eyes hurt. She hates it. Riffing on your age is only socially acceptable if you are between 40 and 60 years old. If you are over 60, nobody wants to hear […]
