Intellectual Curiosities and Provocations

December 2003

David Amram in Performance

Beat Generation,
Poetry Readings
David Amram
Live performance at
The Rudyard Kipling,
Louisville, Kentucky,
November 1, 2003

Over the Halloween/All Saints weekend I was in Louisville, Kentucky to participate in a poetry and music event, Insomniacathon 2003. On the night of All Saints Day, I was in the audience for a wonderful performance by David Amram, a 73-year-old musician and composer who is recognized by many as a living treasure of American and world music.

Sebastopol Skitches (Prankster Book Tour)

Poetry Readings,
Summer Of Love
A week before Thanksgiving I drove to Sebastopol, California near Santa Rosa, to catch a performance/reading by a travelling troupe of writers and Pranksters. The occasion was the release of two new books, one about the late Ken Kesey, and the other written by him. The former is titled Spit in the Ocean. It's a collection of short pieces written in appreciation of Kesey's life and work by those who knew and loved him.

Children’s Literature

Kid Lit
We're looking for new articles about children's literature. This is a broad genre that encompasses numerous eras, styles, themes and cultures. From age-old tales like Cinderella to modern-day pop culture phenomena like Harry Potter, there is plenty of material we'd like to see covered. Author biographies, book reviews, and other forms of commentary are welcome. We're certain that everybody had a favorite book or author when they were younger, and we'd like you to tell us about yours.

The Game of the Name

Beat Generation
Not so long ago I had a large book collection/library that filled two large book shelves in my living room and contained a very large collection of Beat writings and writings on the Beats. All that has changed and I now possess very few books due to circumstances that has absolutely nothing to do with the contents of this article but my telling of it is to forewarn that what follows is a memory piece and is thus open to the corruptions of a memory slightly long of tooth and well known to be obstinate.

Philip Roth’s American Pastoral

Jewish,
Postmodernism,
Summer Of Love


Philip Roth's "American Pastoral" (1997) is steeped in the same subjective brand of voyeurism as his 1959 novella, "Goodbye Columbus". Both works unfold from the perspectives of highly conspicuous and biased narrators. Neil Klugman and Nathan Zuckerman focus on the lives of other characters, whom they admire as well as envy. Their feelings towards these antagonists assume different manifestations; one is overtly superficial, while the other is more penetrating, multi-layered and Jamesian. Ultimately, each narrator is guilty of "ressentiment," the quality defined by the existentialist critic Max Scheler as "a smoldering, suppressed wrath permeated with self-deception".

In "Goodbye Columbus", Neil's ressentiment of Brenda Patimkin is readily apparent. A lower-middle class Jew from Newark, New Jersey, he is angered by his girlfriend's careless display of affluence. He berates her for When she casually talks about having plastic surgery on her nose, his response is, in her view, nasty. Neil's nastiness persists throughout the story, directing itself not only at Brenda, but also at her "disastrously polite" mother, her bratty little sister, and other members of the Jewish nouveau-riche. However, after Brenda asks Neil why he is "so nasty all the time" he denies that it is his intent to be so. In this way, he supresses his anger, giving in to a form of self-deception that prevents him from acknowledging his true feelings for Brenda. Neil fails to recognize that she embodies a sort of wanton materialism which he professes to despise but secretly covets.