Morocco's Seaside Shrines

                                                             Sand, Sea, and the Saints.

A Kazin Goldmine

 

Brandom on Hegel

A Champion of American Literature

                                                         An obituary from 1998.

A Lifetime Burning

 

This is a book that I couldn't put down until I neared the end--at which point I slowed my pace because I couldn't stand the thought of finishing it.

Kazin wrote about his own life with straightforward self-aware honest clarity. And he wrote about others with insight and, for the most part, sympathy. He wrote about literature as one poet to another. He was an Emersonian reader--moreso, I think, than Harold Bloom (who claimed Emerson among his precursors).

An American Confession

 

"This book offers an interpretation of some major figures in American writing during the crucial century that began in the 1830s when Ralph Waldo Emerson left the church and founded a national literature on the basis of a religious revolution."

From the moment I read that opening sentence in the mid-1980s, I was both hooked and stunned. Before encountering this book (tossed carelessly upon a friend's coffee table) I had never even heard of this Alfred Kazin.

He wrote with the authority one acquires through deep acquaintance with the lives and thoughts of his "characters": the "major" American writers of the "crucial century" were "his people" in a way that few before him or since could claim. 

Influence anxiety seized me as I read the book, and it is only recently that I have allowed myself to re-read and properly honor this most accomplished critic and ardent lover of the American literary canon. 

 

Jean Genet

                                                     Edward Said on Genet's late works.

Ramazan!

 

Khatia Buniatishvili - Schubert: Impromptu No. 3 in G-Flat Major, Op. 90...

Walden Woods

 

Dendrochronology