Archie Goodwin

Men of letters at work. —Jacques Barzun, W. H. Auden, and Lionel Trilling.

Through his review of Ann Hartle’s Flannery O’Connor and Blaise Pascal: "Recovering the Incarnation for the Modern Mind," Henry T. Edmondson III highlights the philosophical depth underlying O’Connor’s fiction. lawliberty.org/book-review/a-…

Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That’s all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you, and I sigh. —W. B. Yeats poets.org/poem/drinking-…

@MattWalshBlog “Moby-Dick was Cormac’s favorite book without question, & Faulkner was more of an influence than he liked to admit. He loved Hemingway’s short stories, James Joyce, Dostoyevsky & Shakespeare of course.” Dennis McCarthy on brother Cormac

@oldhumanist Essay “Criticism and the Academy.” It’s from a compilation of essays. I have to look through my books to find the comp title.

“By segmenting the course of literature--in English and in other tongues--into specialized 'fields' defined as time spans, the Academy has made impossible precisely what should be its principal concern: literary history, a history that does not stop and start, or ring down the

Popper had his problems, especially in his dedcutivist views of the philosophy of science, but this is spot on.

"One of the saddest things about the modern world is that people live in a tiny time slice." We are part of a great tradition. Read old books. Listen to classical music. It's incredible. youtube.com/watch?v=xoybTk…

A Major New Kirk Book Announced and Available for Pre-Order How to Understand the Legacy of 1776: buff.ly/YN16ImT

What we hold out before them as the reward for such pusillanimous self-denial is the chance or certainty of their being impregnably secure, and therefore arrogant, within that short time span which they will agree to define as their 'field.'" --Donald Davie

may agree, lived dangerously; they took risks, knowing full well that they were not au fait with the latest scholarship, had not mastered "the secondary material." And we tell our graduate students they must never take such risks, construing as scruple what is in fact timidity.

“I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.” William F. Buckley, Jr.

Reject the man cave, embrace the study

Thanks to @RealClearBooks for featuring @IvanKenneally on Twain’s absurd, noble America. hedgehogreview.com/web-features/t…

As a critic/editor Malcolm Cowley: rescued William Faulkner from obscurity, revised the reputation of Walt Whitman, discovered John Cheever and Ken Kesey, published Jack Kerouac’s On the Road when no one else would, and most importantly chronicled Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and the so-called Lost Generation of writers in Paris who led our national letters into modernism. I write about Cowley in @PorticoQtrly : porticoquarterly.com/book/the-last-…

John Updike’s writing attempted to capture what is ineffably precious and intangible about life. What will be lost if the culture forgets him? Paul Baumann: 'Updike Redux' commonwealmagazine.org/baumann-updike…

"By the title 'Moby-Dick As Doubloon', we acknowledge the tormenting fascination that Moby-Dick has exercised upon its readers and stress that the book, like a coin, has remained finally inviolable." Hershel Parker & Harrison Hayford in the Foreword to 'Moby-Dick As Doubloon'