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Rembrandt and Classic Literature: Finnegan’s Wake, The Unnamable
He painted this at 25. Yesterday I went to the Frick to see the Rembrandt and School exhibit. Rembrandt was a master by the time he was 25. If I had to choose one painting from the Frick to have in my...
View ArticleThe Clown: Part 2, Heinrich Boll and Pierrot
I recently read Nobel-laureate Heinrich Boll’s The Clown. This short masterpiece describes the plight of a monogamous clown whose wife has left him. He’s had a bad review and it’s become evident that...
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What Is Metamodernism?
What comes next? If this is the question then the answer is prologue. It isn’t technology, not yet, because we’re still learning how to feel comfortable with substituting new processes for old. It...
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How to Write a Novel
For the past eight and a half months I have been writing a novel. I have written a novel before, but it was not for the light of day. I did not know how to write a novel so I spent two years working...
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The Clown: Part 1, Coney Island
I met this guy and he told me he became afraid of clowns on Coney Island because that image of the laughing clown with the sharp teeth started there in the funhouse and bumper cars and he said I was...
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The Clown: Part 2, Heinrich Boll and Pierrot
I recently read Nobel-laureate Heinrich Boll’s The Clown. This short masterpiece describes the plight of a monogamous clown whose wife has left him. He’s had a bad review and it’s become evident that...
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Why Stephen King’s The Shining Is Good (But Ain’t Classic Literature)
I am twenty-four pages away from finishing The Shining, by Stephen King. It’s good, I gotta say. But it ain’t classic literature. I always disparaged King as a mainstream writer but in recent months...
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Why Deal Cocaine
If I were a coke dealer I would definitely wear a bigger earring. It would be a gold hoop about half an inch wide, and I’d probably get the other ear pierced too, like the boss in Pulp Fiction, crazy...
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Metamodernist Imagism
Imagist, objectivist, metamodernist, they all share one thing in common: lack of association. I’m reading A Farewell to Arms right now, after having saved it for this moment for years. I’m struck by...
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Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery: Doin’ It Right
Cat was giving us a tour of Brooklyn‘s Greenwood Cemetery. I biked up to the neo-Gothic entrance of the cemetery to where Cat and Laura stood waiting. Julie rolled up, looking aggressive and badass...
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How to Be Creative
Creativity is hard to measure and hard to generate. Society reveres the product of creative genius for centuries after that flash of inspiration first strikes. But no one really knows how to be...
View ArticleSEO Value For Your Blog and Tradical 360
Most of my readers may be unfamiliar with the term SEO. If so, it’s time to learn what it means. SEO and Tradical 360 If you’ve tried to check my site in recent days and been dissatisfied, there’s a...
View ArticleMeditation In Three Minutes
Meditation is more than some mystical, spiritual practice for people who do yoga. Studies show meditation can increase a person’s positive emotional states. Much like any other skill, meditation...
View ArticleMy 6 Best Albums of 2013
It’s that time. Mistletoe, holiday parties, punch bowls. And best albums of 2013 lists. Here’s mine. 6. Kelala, Cut 4 Me: This takes me back to the early nineties when my momz would be all up in the...
View ArticleClassic Literature You Should Read: Zeno’s Conscience
Zeno’s Conscience is high modernist classic literature in all its glory. Italo Svevo studied English under James Joyce, who read this unknown author’s work and helped him publish it in Paris. Indeed,...
View ArticleRead This Next: Blindness
Enough Ambiguity Blindness is the absence of hope. The notion that Saramago’s masterpiece is weakened by ambiguity is misconstrued because it is clear throughout the novel that the resiliency of the...
View ArticleThe Book Every Man (And Woman) Should Read: A Farewell to Arms
When I was sixteen we had to write a “thesis” on an American author. I wasn’t too versed in literature as a junior in high school, but I knew the name Hemingway. After reading some of his short stories...
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Jude the Obscure and D.H. Lawrence
Hardy’s birthplace. Hardy’s Pessimism Of all Thomas Hardy’s novels, this is perhaps the darkest and the most controversial. A story of two cousins who fall in love and find their lives cursed as a...
View ArticleWhy I Am A Modern Nomad
What Am I Doing Here? Bruce Chatwin is a name I had never heard before Richard Littauer gave me his book, What Am I Doing Here?. At times Chatwin is tiresome and pompous, especially when describing...
View ArticleYour Life as a Fractal
Every life starts on a path, a trunk, a baseline. Our temperament defines this path, our experiences are a result of our tendencies. And all of this could be graphed fractally, that is, as a fractal....
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