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Saul Bellow Versus Hugh Kenner
Saul Bellow: Hugh Kenner foe Saul Bellow’s selected letters have just been published and, at least according to a review by Jeff Simon, they reveal that the Nobel Prize winning novelist really hated...
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The Political Circus, 1921 and 2011
Art Young, "The Political Circus" from 1921 Art Young (1866-1943) was arguably the greatest radical cartoonist America has ever produced and also one of the very few political cartoonists whose work...
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Canada Reads: Life Raft and Lottery
Reading on the Life Raft Over at the Walrus I have a think-piece about the meaning of the CBC Radio program Canada Reads, which I use as a jumping off point for a larger discussion of the difficulties...
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Denis Dutton, RIP (Part I)
Denis Dutton The late Denis Dutton, who created the website Arts and Letters Daily and who died at the end of last year, was a someone who I had fairly complicated feelings towards. In the early years...
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Guy Davenport: Learning How to Die
Guy Davenport, 1964, as recorded by Jonathan Williams. In his last letter to his sister Gloria Williamson, written shortly before he succumbed to cancer, Guy Davenport wrote, “”I hope you’re as happy...
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Van Gogh and Weimar Democracy
Over at the National Post, I have a review of Modris Eksteins’ Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Age, which makes a provocative but not wholly convincing case...
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Hilton Kramer: A Dissenting Obituary
Hilton Kramer: cover photo for The Revenge of the Philistines Hilton Kramer, the art critic and founding editor of The New Criterion who died at age 84 earlier this week, rather enjoyed his own...
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The Problems with Patterson’s Heinlein Biography
Robert A. Heinlein I reviewed the late William Patterson’s new biography of the writer Robert Heinlein for the New Republic. Because the New Republic is a general interest magazine, I focused my...
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Portraiture and time
“Lisa” (Ian Garrick Mason, 2015) It took me a long time to come to portraiture as an art form. I began taking photographs systematically only five years ago or so; equipped with a Blackberry provided...
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Glimpsing beauty
“Stephanie in the city” (Ian Garrick Mason, 2015) Last weekend my friend Stephanie and I went out for evening drinks, before which we did a forty-five minute twilight shoot on the sidewalks of...
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