Eric Scheske

Subscribe

Literature

Literature

“The novel’s spirit is the spirit of complexity. The novelist says to the reader: things are not as simple as you think.” Milan Kundera It thereby is a rebuke to the left hemisphere and its preference for neat, predictable, and efficient abstraction. Reading is also frustratingly aimless and, to the left hemisphere's way of stilted thinking, a waste of time.

How You Attend to the World Changes What You Find There

How You Attend to the World Changes What You Find There

And if you attend sloppily, what you'll find is slop Do you want to understand what you're thinking about? Then think as clearly about it as possible. Do you want to think clearly about something? Then think in clear terms. On the flip side, if you

Hate the River-Rat!

Hate the River-Rat!

I gotta say, I'm really enjoying Will Percy's 1941 autobiography, Lanterns of the Levee. I'd heard of it for years but never bothered to buy it, much less read it. The prose is beautiful, if a bit ornate by today's standard, and

In Praise of Clichés

In Praise of Clichés

Avoid stale phrases. Orwell called them "dying metaphors." Robert Fiske called them "moribund metaphors." They're sayings that have been used hundreds of time but haven't yet made it into regular vernacular. "Emotional rollercoaster," "It's a jungle out

Jon Fosse

Jon Fosse

Mr. Fosse received the Nobel Prize in Literature on October 5th. This development is relevant to TDE for three reasons: (1) It's literature, which is a form of counter-conduct and a means of flourishing; (2) He converted to Catholicism in 2012; and (3) In the words of the

Dreiser, Cather, Stevens

Dreiser, Cather, Stevens

From The Tablet

I Spent Wednesday Evening with a Bottle of Gin and a Pile of Old Magazines, Wasting Time on a Stupid Task

I Spent Wednesday Evening with a Bottle of Gin and a Pile of Old Magazines, Wasting Time on a Stupid Task

It was a delightful waste of time.

A Room with a Feud

A Room with a Feud

Literary criticism used to be terribly clever and terribly savage.

How to Write for Surfer Dudes

How to Write for Surfer Dudes

I spent last summer, taking digital essay lessons. They were part of a series that I call, “Learning to Write for Morons,” by Medium.com. I learned a lot, but I can condense the lessons into one premise: If you're writing online articles, you have a split second

English Drunks, Both Fictional and Not

English Drunks, Both Fictional and Not

I linked to The Guardian’s obituary of Wilfrid Sheed (1940-2011) yesterday. Sheed’s first book was A Middle Class Education (1960), which was apparently semi-autobiographical, much like Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The Guardian notes that there’s a lot of drinking in Middle Class: Owing more to Kingsley

New Catholic Journal is Lighting It Up

As long as I’m gushing about literary journals, I should mention The Lamp. This newcomer is smart, appears to be well-funded, and takes its Catholicism seriously without getting bogged down in it. Exhibit A: The review-essay from its current issue by Joseph Epstein that I wrote about last week.