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Invention and Rhetorical Purpose
Novice writers often lack an awareness of rhetorical purpose. Study the assignment. Analyze and understand the assignment. Figure out and narrow down the writing topic. Don’t worry so much about...
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Thoughts from Childhood…
I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother this week. February 20th would have been her birthday. She influenced me a great deal. She was a hard-working woman, strong, and had endured the kind of...
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Azorean Farmers in California’s Central Valley
Here is a link to an article that has been published in the Portuguese American Journal, a review I wrote on an exhibit at the Tulare County Museum of Farm Labor and Agriculture… California leads the...
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“Adeus, Portugal! Bem Feito”: A Review of Anthony Barcellos’ A Land of Milk...
A version of this review was published in the Portuguese American Journal on March 29, 2013: Anthony Barcellos knows the stench. In California’s Central Valley, Tulare County Portuguese American...
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On Fernando Pessoa’s Philosophical Essays
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is considered to be a great European intellectual and a preeminent Portuguese modernist. Born in Lisbon, he grew up in South Africa and had an English education at St....
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Without Words: Sorting Facts with Susan Howe
Wallace Stevens said that the concepts of philosophy can be poetic. Around the same time, Ludwig Wittgenstein made the case that logic is sublime, not because “It seeks to see to the foundation of...
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Yeats and Pessoa
W.B. Yeats and Fernando Pessoa seem to be ill-suited for comparison. True, they were both Modernist poets who were near contemporaries, but the Portuguese man-of-letters was hardly among Yeats’s...
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On Fernando Pessoa–‘The Metaphysical Courier’
Judith Balso’s Pessoa, The Metaphysical Courier, translated by Drew Burk (NY: Atropos Press 2011) is the most informative full-length study on the Portuguese poet’s philosophical interests that’s...
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Fernando Pessoa and the Logic of Free Will
We know that Fernando Pessoa wrote on existential themes–boredom, absurdity, authenticity–but it isn’t common knowledge that he wrote on the metaphysics of free will. As it turns out, the concept of...
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The Chaos and Splendor of Fernando Pessoa and Eduardo Lourenço
Although he is a prominent Portuguese cultural critic and a leading intellectual, Eduardo Lourenço is not widely known in the Anglo-American world. He was born on May 23, 1923, in São Pedro de Rio...
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Darrell Kastin’s ‘The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales’
Darrell Kastin is a Portuguese-American writer who’s making quite a name for himself. Born in Los Angeles, California in 1957, much of his writing focuses on his family’s roots in the Azores. He is a...
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Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus”
A few lines… Albert Camus wrote a famous essay entitled “The Myth of Sisyphus,” describing a heroic rebel’s eternal punishment of pushing a rock uphill. Two sections of the story confuse us the most....
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Thinking With Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf
Let’s consider an excerpt from Hesse’s classic novel Steppenwolf: Now what we call “bourgeois,” when regarded as an element always to be found in human life, is nothing else than the search for...
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Thinking Again with Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf
Here is a lengthy quote worth looking at in full: My life had become weariness. It had wandered in a maze of unhappiness that led to renunciation and nothingness; it was bitter with the salt of all...
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The Merits of the London Review of Books
When I wake up too early on weekend mornings I frequently read interviews at the Paris Review. Have you seen their interviews archive? You can read really cool interviews by any number of your...
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An Unwritten Novel: Fernando Pessoa’s ‘The Book of Disquiet’
Thomas J. Cousineau’s scholarly expertise on twentieth-century literary modernism informs his new critical study An Unwritten Novel: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (Dalkey Archive 2013)....
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A Door Into the Dark: When I Heard Seamus Heaney Had Died…
In the early morning hours of Friday, August 30, 2013, I read the news that Seamus Heaney had died. I was sipping coffee and nearly dropped my cup as I choked in astonished grief. A legend is no...
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Last Words on Seamus Heaney
From an email correspondence by Kevin Whelan: Today I want to remember Seamus the poet rather than Seamus the friend. Seamus always regarded his poetic talent as a gift: something given to him,...
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On Blaise Cendrars–Good Writing for the Hell of It
Blaise Cendrars is known as an important 20th Century French poet, but I regard him as fine prose stylist. He offers an interview in the Paris Review (1966) which reveals his reading and writing...
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Why Henry Miller is Relevant–His Writerly Advice
Love or hate him, Henry Miller has good advice about the craft of writing. Misogynist, pornographer, or faux-Zen Buddhist, Miller pronounces authentic passion for the arts and the life of the mind....
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