Category Archives: Literature

Notes on The Magic Mountain: “Operationes Spirituales”

Posted on June 29, 2022 by Lee

There is no chance that Ludovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta, the intellectuals portrayed in The Magic Mountain, will ever agree with each other. If one of them says something, you can guarantee that the other will say the opposite. It … Continue reading →

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Notes on The Magic Mountain: “An Attack, and a Repulse”

Posted on June 22, 2022 by Lee

Hans Castorp knows something we don’t. You might wonder why a book like The Magic Mountain is so long: well, it treats of a subject impossible to put into so many words. So you need to sit with it a … Continue reading →

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Fools Reproach

Posted on April 6, 2022 by Lee

William Blake’s infernal wisdom: that evil is the energy of the body and acts upon desire. Good bounds this energy, and wants to restrain desire. That if your desire can be restrained, then it was a weak desire. That desire, … Continue reading →

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Art and Life: Notes on some Conversations with Allen Ginsberg

Posted on March 31, 2022 by Lee

It begins with the personal. “Life is full of strange experiences,” he says. Allen Ginsberg finds the extraordinary in the everyday. “Each one has his inner nature that he has to satisfy,” says Louis Ginsberg, attempting to account for the … Continue reading →

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Notes on Gregory Corso’s “Variations on a Generation”

Posted on March 30, 2022 by Lee

The Beat Generation was never supposed to become so big, says Gregory Corso, and that’s why it has such a stupid name. If they’d known they might have spent more time thinking about it. Perhaps not. It doesn’t make sense … Continue reading →

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The Imperfection of Henry Miller

Posted on March 7, 2022 by Lee

Henry Miller has made a vow not to alter a line of what he writes because perfection is no longer his object. He wants to get to know his own mind, with all its faults and weaknesses, and share with … Continue reading →

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A Life for Wandering Through

Posted on February 7, 2022 by Lee

Paris in the 1930s was a place where you could simply be an artist. It didn’t matter if you produced any significant work or not. For example, Henry Miller tells us that an acquaintance of his, called Sylvester, will never … Continue reading →

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The Editor and the Escritoire

Posted on January 28, 2022 by Lee

A less extraordinary mind would have been incapable of worrying so much about an old desk and would never have made the discovery. Victor Eremita, fictitious editor of Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, tells the story of how he came across the … Continue reading →

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Notes on Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin

Posted on October 12, 2021 by Lee

The sun is shining and Berlin belongs to Hitler, is the almost final thought of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. Christopher catches his reflection in a shop window and is horrified to see that he is smiling: sunshine is still … Continue reading →

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Notes on David S. Wills: Burroughs on Civilisation, Hallucination, and Telepathy

Posted on July 30, 2021 by Lee

For William Burroughs, the nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a dividing point in history, marking the moment that Western civilisation finally ended. Could you really call a people capable of such an atrocity “civilised”? And so without civilisation, … Continue reading →

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