Tag: Paris
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Casting Sophia Coppola in ‘The Leopard’
My Twitter friend the writer Kim Askew invited me to guest post on her site Romancing the Tome last week as part of a celebration of the release of her new book Tempestuous (co-authored with Amy Helmes). I wrote about one of my favorite novels The Leopard by the Italian writer Giuseppe di Lampedusa and why director Francis Ford Coppola should use it…
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Grappling With James Joyce
Grappling with James Joyce at the beginning of the 21st Century is similar to reading Shakespeare’s tragedies or even working your way through the Old Testament—you recognize immediately you are knee-deep in cultural source material. It feels less accurate to call Joyce a modernist than to say he was modernism, for it’s clear how much of our…
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A Few Gems from Henry James
To move from a contemporary novel to a book by Henry James is like leaving a meadow and stepping into an ancient bamboo grove where the surroundings are undoubtedly exquisite, but the trees are packed together, and if you’re careless, you’ll quickly lose your way. Henry James’ The Ambassadors (1903) is stocked with gems worthy…
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Advice For The Troubled
“It is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble, and that is my advice for everyone except Parisians.” -Muriel Spark
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My Essay in ‘The Millions’
I recently published an essay on the online literary site The Millions titled, “Paris, Wikipedia and My Middle Age Crisis.” Each man’s middle age crisis begins at an indeterminate age and offers a peculiar window into the architecture of masculine decline. In this respect it mimics death, which is both punctual and ruthlessly efficient in…