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Does Morrissey even want children like me —
Daniel Morris
In My End is My Beginning: Seeing Double at “Philip Guston Now”
Philip Guston, the influential North American painter who died in 1980, has been on my mind lately. This essay is about why. It is also a belated thank you note to him. I say this because, half a lifetime ago, my awareness of this hero/bad boy of Twentieth Century art saved my hide. Or, more realistically, to take my grandiose appreciation of his efforts down a few notches, a job talk I gave at Purdue about Guston in 1994 clinched my unlikely shot at a permanent academic career in the humanities. (I am ashamed to admit that when I was thirty, landing safely on the tenure track felt like a life-or-death matter.) Can I recover what Guston’s art meant to me back then on a gut level? I can certainly remember the outlines of my precarious situation back then, and why Guston’s late trauma-filled work would have appealed to me on a deep personal level.
Should I keep reading “Enlightenment Now”?
Should I be good? My therapist insists I could.
Simply read, NOT “read into,” Enlightenment Now.
In Praise of Secular Jewish American Lyric Commentary: Why Bob Dylan and Louise Glück are 21st Century Nobel Laureates
Seven decades after what Benjamin Schreier calls, “the dominant event of Jewish American literary history,” which is the “‘breakthrough’ – the irruption in the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley into the heart of American cultural scene,” two Jewish American lyricists have received the Nobel Prize for Literature in a span of four years: Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941) in 2016 and Louise Glück (born in New York City in 1943 and raised on Long Island) in 2020 (Schreier, 2).
The Bitter Logician and The Trimmer: Rereading Allen Grossman and Eugene Goodheart in My Middle Age
Penniless and nearing thirty circa 1990, the one ace up my sleeve was that I “worked with Grossman.” Grossman. The Brandeis English department’s quite literal resident “genius” poet and pedagogue. In August 1989, Allen R. Grossman had in fact received a John D. and Catherine T. Mac Arthur “Genius” Grant. Needless to say, I owned no mutual funds back then, but Grossman’s stock was on the rise when he was my doctoral adviser.