Introduction

2011-09-04T15:50:00.000-07:00

I'm not really the blogger type; I lack the impulse for disclosure so characteristic of internet culture, and that said I can make no promises of consistent posting. The title, I hope, explains my position.

Disclaimer aside, I imagine most posts will be about my various hobby horses: literature, philosophy, and possibly music.

My latest intellectual venture has been the complete poetry and prose of William Blake, a deeply challenging and rewarding experience. Even his "simplest" and most economical poems have a biting edge to them, a snake hidden in the flowers, if one looks carefully.
The sprawling and probing epics, "Milton," "Jerusalem,"and "The Four Zoas," the beating heart of Blake's poetic body, are unlike anything else, at once obscure and hallucinatory.

As far as novels go, I am currently occupied with Ulysses, an amusing and wearisome book. Amo et odi. In my madder moments I can imagine myself as a James Joyce scholar, but in broad daylight I'm able to reassure myself that such oddities, although perhaps a pleasure for a moment, are not for me.

I've also been rereading Virginia Woolf's The Waves, almost a year since I first read it, entering into that strange yet familiar world once more. A truly sublime novel, literature as hypnosis, more to my taste than Joyce.

Such broad remarks mean little without subsequent analysis; I will elaborate, if time permits.

Parerga and Paralipomena

Introduction