Tag Archives: Herman Melville

such a deal for you

You can sell anything. Everything is negotiable. RIP Ziggy. Zig Ziglar, an American original that harks back to the old Yankee salesman, something out of Constance Rourke’s Americana treasury and Herman Melville and that old American archetype “the untrustworthy narrator.” … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

one day there time will surely come

Nothing like a little heresy to reinflate the sagging body of the church. The heresy of twenty plus centuries, as infinite as private choice , is hardly random, but keeps to certain well-defined channels. Past the multitudinous polysyllabic channels to … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

fauning the big try

Yet, at the height of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s powers, with a sounder preparation than any American contemporary for fictional tasks still uncompleted, he wrote no fiction to speak of. Like many American writers who followed him, he had come up to … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

vulnerabilities

it is not hard to be convinced that Nathaniel Hawthorne was born to write in the manner of Dickens and Balzac. In The Blithedale Romance he did. There are gothic furbelows attached to the novel, also-spook stuff and mystifications to … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

something sad, terrific

Nathaniel Hawthorne was ten years away from Brook Farm, the socialist, utopian project, before he wrote the book The Blithedale Romance, from his observations there. By then, the success of The Scarlet Letter had justified his habit of looking at … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

grotesque castaway: permanent alienation

After the success of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the most famous American writers. But in the twelve years following his graduation from college in 1825, he was the most invisible. He went back to his mother’s … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

scarlet fever of moral torment

Yet for all its gloom and whisper of abominations, The Scarlet letter is among those great tales in which the spectrum of meanings runs unbroken from the clearest daylight into vibrations beyond either visions or rational interpretation. Those who wish … Continue reading

Posted in Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

furious circumstances: reckless vaults of imagination

In the middle of 1849, during a summer of torrid heat in Salem, Massachusetts, the contending forces in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s life were drawing into battle formation, as for a civil war ling in preparation. His mother lay dying in a … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Literature/poetry/spoken word | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

frank images

Loneliness and despair. Its part of the human condition. But not all of it. In its significance, and near pervasiveness, Robert Frank has been one of the best to capture, articulating all its nuances through mainly photography, but also film … Continue reading

Posted in Cinema/Visual/Audio, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Modern Arts/Craft | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

kingfish on the hustings

You have to wonder if this new phenomenon called Americans.select.org is an effort to establish a technocracy rule in the United States, something that Thorstein Veblen felt would be the inevitable consequences of a capitalism as it became increasingly complex … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment