Dylan’s case, though, history is only one branch of knowledge and creativity that absorbs him: whether it’s a Juvenal satire or a picture at an exhibition or a recording of Robert Johnson, Dylan responds by breaking things down, trying to understand how they work and what makes them different from everything else. As the critic Greil Marcus recently noted, it’s helpful to think of Dylan as a scholar, as well as craftsman. Do so and we might better understand how his art works.
“Every choice has an obverse, that is to say a renunciation,” the narrator of “The Castle of Crossed Destinies,” a shapeshifting late novel by Italo Calvino, observes. If this man is right—and he seems wise, if often visited by a strange turbulence—then we are constantly inflicting violence of a metaphysical nature. We go about our lives smothering possibilities and knifing alternatives, slashing at the fabric of reality itself. By trade, the narrator tells us, he is a fiction writer; he understands what it means to impose his will. One imagines him killing off subpar versions of his characters, littering the forks in his narrative with corpses. His off-kilter energy, which the novel itself shares—is it a shudder of reluctance, or a thrill of pleasure?
By harnessing the power of the atom and capturing the potential to unleash divine fire in its hands, humanity understandably developed something of a Prometheus complex when we made the first nuclear bomb. As the Cold War dragged on in the years after World War II, scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain started looking for ways this new ability could be used for the benefit of humanity, not just to kill everything and render the planet uninhabitable. But we're not talking about nuclear power—no, we're talking about the U.S. government's very real plan to detonate a bunch of nukes in the California desert and blast a highway bypass for Route 66 into existence.
I discovered more about my dad through the food he loved. My dad’s cooking methods tell me about his patience, the spices he is drawn to speak of complexities and his choice of ingredients signals resourcefulness. Now, he works in the kitchens and he is always telling me about the things he’s cooking – gungo beans, mackerel curry, rice and beans. In prison, his food is influenced by what he’s able to get, the people around him and the time he has.
One of the elements that makes “Three Martini” so successful is that Crowther does an exceptional job of painting both Plath and Sexton as trailblazers years before the feminist movement took a foothold in America’s conscience. Given the current climate and the #MeToo movement, Crowther has written a necessary book that has given her subject matter a fresh importance in how we reflect on the accomplishments of both Plath and Sexton.
The Demon Dog of Crime Fiction is back, and this time around it's more boocoo bad business, crooked cops, pervs, prowlers, and putzo politicians than ever, and that's saying a lot. James Ellroy's Widespread Panic is quintessential Ellroy, but with enough alliteration, Hollyweird flavor, booze, distressed damsels, communist conspiracies, and extortion to make this the most Ellroy novel he's ever written.
A statement from his publisher shows that, as a result of books being returned to the warehouse, he has sold minus 45. ‘I have therefore sold 45 fewer novels than an unpublished writer. No mean feat.’
How God Becomes Real is an ethnographically-informed study focused on the development of a person’s relationship with God, including the ways in which they come to hear God speak to them. What is bracketed is the question of whether or not they are really hearing from God—or even whether or not God really exists. Whether or not God exists is an important question, of course, but it is primarily another kind of question – philosophical or theological, perhaps – rather than an anthropological one.