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• Ship of Fools, the Enduring Metaphor
  I stumbled upon our society’s most fascinating enduring metaphor by chance. Clicking around on iTunes, I noticed that I owned six different songs called “Ship of Fools”. But these weren’t six different versions of one song. “Ship of Fools” was not a classic cover song, like “Dancing in the Streets” or “Hallelujah”. Rather, six different …
• Proust’s Lost Time: Beyond The Madeleines
  Between June 2009 and December 2010, Michael Norris explored Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, also known as Remembrance of Things Past, in these pages. Here, with original artwork by David Richardson, is the entire sequence. Marcel Proust: Beyond the Madeleines June 16, 2009 Pondering Proust II September 8, 2009 Pondering Proust III: Guermantes …
• J. M. Coetzee, Master of the Enigmatic Novel
  Ask me to name my favorite living writer, and I just might name J. M. Coetzee, formerly of South Africa, now of Australia. I think his best novels are Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man, and I also get a tremendous kick out of his two recent meta-fictional adventures in psychological self-deconstruction, Diary of a …
• Gettysburg 150: The Book That Made Me a Civil War Geek
  I’ve never been sure how to reconcile the fact that I’m a pacifist with the fact that I’m a major American Civil War geek. Though I’m a major geek, I’m not a Major — that is, I don’t participate in any Union or Confederate reenactment brigade. But I’ve been to many reenactments since the 150th …
• Philosophy Weekend: A Dangerous Method
  We need more movies about philosophers. I can only think of very few examples to mention, but David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, a 2011 film about the rivalry between early psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, shows that the format can work. This is an intelligent and straightforward narrative work, based on Christopher Hampton’s play …
• Sixteen Songs About a Ship of Fools
  A few days ago I began exploring how writers from Plato to Sebastian Brant to Katherine Anne Porter have written about a “Ship of Fools”. This was inspired by my discovery that sixteen different songs with that exact title have been written and performed by major rock, punk, folk and pop artists between 1969 and …
• Glimpses
  It’s a new year and a new universe (because, let’s face it, the universe is always changing, and always new) … and I’m now writing with a new name. So I thought I’d reach for something familiar and easy and tell you briefly about what I’ve been reading and enjoying lately. Here are three things …
• Edmond Rostand and the Fantasticks
  A link on Terry Teachout’s blog to a super-rare full-length kinescope recording of The Fantasticks from 1964 brought back lots of memories for me, and not just ancient ones, because I’ve seen this great Off-Broadway musical at least eight times, most recently only a few years ago with my kids. It’s a musical comedy about …