Bill Knott’s friend and fellow poet, Thomas Lux, edited I Am Flying Into Myself and provides a moving Introduction to this quirky poet. Bill Knott lost his parents at an early age. He suffered abuse in orphanages. After a brief stint in the Army, Knott drifted from job to job. Knot took a poetry class from John Logan and started to write poems in the 1960s. His first book of poems, The Naomi Poems, was published under the pseudonym of “St. Geraud” who was “a virgin and a suicide.”
As you can surmise, Bill Knott was a weird dude. His poems are quirky and moody. Here’s a sample:
“Death”
Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest. They will place my hands like this, It will look as though I am flying into myself.
Bill Knott died in Bay City, Michigan after failed heart surgery in 2014. Who is your favorite poet?
Tony Tanner ((18 March 1935 – 5 December 1998) was a British literary critic of the 19th and 20th centuries, and a pioneering figure in the study of American literature. He was a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, where he taught and studied for 38 years, from 1960 until his death in 1998. My first Tony Tanner book was The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature (1965).
Reading The Reign of Wonder in the mid-Sixties when I was 16 years old was probably a too ambitious move on my part. I had read some of the writers Tanner analyzed–Twain, some Emerson, some Hemingway, some Thoreau, some Whitman–but none of Henry James, Gertrude Stein, or Sherwood Anderson. James, Stein, and Anderson would have to wait until I attended Marquette University in 1967 and those writers showed up in my required English classes.
But what I gleaned from The Reign of Wonder made me want to read more of Tanner’s writings. Over the years, I read several of Tanner’s books of literary criticism. I enjoyed his Henry James: The Writer and His Work (1985), a short work based on a series of pamphlets the British Council asked Tanner to write about Henry James. For a newcomer to Henry James, Tanner’s slim book guides the reader through James’s long and varied career while providing key insights into James’s works.
Although Tony Tanner wrote about many American writers, both old and new, it was obvious he was most fascinated by Henry James: “From a distance the theme of the blank, quivering American sensibility immersed and involved in the European order seems indeed to be basic to James’s fiction. From the wide-eyed, socially non comprehending condor of Daisy Miller to the perpetually open eyes of Adam Verver; from Daisy Miller’s death in the miasmic atmosphere of Rome to Milly Teale’s turn to the wall in Venice, from succumbing of Roderick Hudson to the suicide of Grace Mavis on board the Patagonia; from the undamaged return of Christopher Newman to the perverse yet enlightened renunciation of Lambert Stretcher; from the confident dismissal of Europeans by Betsy Alden and Pandora, through the precarious victory of Francie Dodson, on to the new kind of mastery of a shattered European society as managed by Mrs. Gracedew and Maggie Verver: in all these related and developed themes the dramatic interlocking of a new sensibility with an old civilization is the fulcrum.” (p. 264-265)
Henry James took risks by making women and children centers of his stories. Take What Maisie Knew (1897) where Maisie, a child abandoned by her real parents and exploited by adulterous step-parents, tries to figure out situations without understanding adult motives. As Tanner cleverly assesses the novel, “In a sense the book hinges on what Maisie does not know.” (p. 288)
In 2000, Cambridge University Press published The American Mystery: American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo. While the essays delve into Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Howells, Fitzgerald, DeLillo and Pynchon, the best essays in The American Mystery focus on Henry James. If you’re interested in astute literary criticism of classic American writers, The American Mystery, The Reign of Wonder, and Henry James are hard to beat. GRADE: A (for all three)
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Foreword — ix
Edward W. Said
Sources — xii
Introduction: Tony Tanner on American means of writing and means of writing America — xiv
Ian F. A. Bell
Lustres and condiments: Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Essays
1(8)
`A summer in the country’: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance
9(30)
`Nothing but cakes and ale’: Herman Melville’s White-Jacket
39(23)
`All interweavingly working together’: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
62(19)
Melville’s counterfeit detector: The Confidence-Man
81(23)
`The Story in It’ – and the story without it
104(17)
Henry James
Henry James’s `saddest story’: The Other House
121(11)
Henry James and Shakespeare
132(17)
`Feelings of middle life’: William Dean Howells’s Indian Summer
149(17)
`The story of the moon that never rose’: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
166(35)
Don DeLillo and `the American mystery’: Underworld
201(21)
`The Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes’: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon
222(17)
Index — 239
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Acknowledgements
viii
Introduction: the sleep of reason
1
The Transcendentalists
Saints behold: the transcendentalist point of view
19
Emerson: the unconquered eye and the enchanted circle
26
Thoreau and the sauntering eye
46
Walt Whitman’s ecstatic first step Transcendentalism and Imagism
64 87
Mark Twain
The doctors of the wilderness
97
A system of reduction
104
The voice of the outlaw
127
The pond of youth
143
Huck Finn and the reflections of a saphead
155
The Twentieth Century
Gertrude Stein and the complete actual present
187
Sherwood Anderson’s Little Things
205
Ernest Hemingway’s Unhurried Sensations
228
Henry James
The candid outsider
261
The range of wonderment
278
The subjective adventure
309
Afterword: wonder and alienation – the mystic and the moviegoer
336
References
362
Index– 381
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Preface — ix
I. America and Europe, 1843-1881: ” A Complex Fate” — 3
II. London, 1882-1898: “The Compendium of the World” — 49
III. Lamb House, 1899-1916: “The Divine Unrest” — 97
My favorite movie of 2024 was A Complete Unknown. Timothée Chalamet plays Bob Dylan at the beginning of his career in the early 1960s in New York City. The movie is based on Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties (2016).
The musical performances by Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez were convincing. Chalamet learned 35 Bob Dylan songs and some of them show up on this movie soundtrack.
If you’re a fan of Bob Dylan, you’ll enjoy this look at Dylan’s life from 1961-1965. GRADE: A (for both the movie and the soundtrack)
I’ve enjoy Will Murray’s The Wild Adventures of Cthulhu, Volume 1 (you can read my review here) and The Wild Adventures of Cthulhu, Volume 2 (you can read my review here). The latest in the series, The Wild Adventures of Cthulhu, Volume 3 arrived and it features more original stories than the previous two volumes that mostly reprinted stories Will Murray wrote for various anthologies.
You’ll meet ghouls in “What Ghouls These Portals Be.” Dark forces threaten our world in “The House at One Tower Way.” The secret to time travel and reading the Future come together in “Kingsport Tea.”
I enjoyed “Cthulhu’s Garden” and was unnerved by “The Summoner of Khalk’ru.”
If you’re in the mood for another group of Lovecraftian horror stories, give Will Murray’s third volume a try. GRADE: B+
This edition of Turbotax does away with the CD-ROM. Users need to download the tax program and install it on their computers. I miss the CD-ROM because downloads can be problematic. Fortunately, I was able to download and install Turbotax in five minutes.
I’ve used Turbotax for decades. Some years are much better than others. This latest version transferred last year’s tax information and it took me about an hour to input all our tax information.
Once the tax calculations were done, I had to e-file the Federal and State returns which involves typing in numbers from Diane and my NY State driver’s licenses. Since the IRS just laid off 5,000 employees during Tax Season, my confidence in the processing of my Federal Tax Return is not high. But the IRS notified me they received my e-filed return. I’m still waiting to hear from NY State.
Basically, our tax returns now that we’re retired consists of four numbers: Diane’s Social Security and NY State pension and my Social Security and NY State pension. We have no deductions since Patrick and Katie are off on their own, our house and vehicles are paid off, and our lives are placid and debt-free.
We owe the Feds some money and NY State some money. We’ll send them some checks and be done with this chore for another year. How are your taxes?
John Warner, a writer and college professor, does a Deep Dive into ChatGPT and related Artificial Intelligence programs in his new book, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI (2025). “Large language models [like ChatGPT] do not ‘write.’ They generate syntax. They do not think, feel, or experience anything. They are fundamentally incapable of judging truth, accuracy, or veracity.” (p. 18) Or care about truth, accuracy, or veracity. But they are very good at generating words.
In addition to being a word generator, AI can be used to scam the innocent. “An AI-generated book, The Evolution of Jazz: A Century of Improvisation and Innovation by Frank Gioia and Ted Alkyer, came into the world. The dual authors were designed to take advantage of the fact that Ted Gioia (The History of Jazz) and Alkyer ( publisher of Downbeat magazine) are two noted jazz experts…. Because both Gioia and Alkyer have their own public platforms and were able to make a fuss, the scam was exposed and the books will pulled from sale…” (p. 189)
So Artificial Intelligence programs can “write” fake books. All too often, the scammers using AI end up making money before they’re found out–or continue to operate their schemes indefinitely. They certainly don’t have to pay the AI program to generate more books.
“In 2021, Brandon Sanderson, a best-selling author of science fiction and fantasy, announced on the Kickstarter platform that he was setting out to raise $1 million as a crowdfunding effort for four yet-to-be-written novels. By the time the campaign was over, Sanderson had raised over $41 million.” (p. 198). Is the the future for writers in the Age of AI? Do you use Artificial Intelligence? Are you as worried about the Artificial Intelligence future as I am? GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction — 1
PART ONE
Chapter 1 Automation, Not Intelligence — 15
Chapter 2 Stop, Now, Before It’s Too Late! — 29
Chapter 3 A Personal History of the Automation of Writing — 43
PART TWO
Chapter 4 Only Humans Write — 55
Chapter 5 Writing Is Thinking — 61
Chapter 6 Writing Is Feeling — 75
Chapter 7 Writing Is a Practice — 89
Chapter 8 Life with a Writing Practice — 103
Chapter 9 Reading and Writing — 113
PART THREE
Chapter 10 Reading, Writing, and Robots — 127
Chapter 11 Here Come the Teaching Machines (Again) — 133
Chapter 12 Writing in the Classroom of Today (and Tomorrow) — 147
Chapter 13 Reading Like a Writer — 165
Chapter 14 Content vs. Writing — 179
Chapter 15 On the Future of Writing for Money — 191
Chapter 16 My Digital Doppelgänger — 211
PART FOUR
Chapter 17 A Framework for Action: Resist, Renew, Explore — 225
The first Larry McMurtry book I read was Lonesome Dove (1985). The 1989 Western adventure television miniseries was announced and I read the novel before I watched the episodes. The series was originally broadcast by CBS from February 5 to 8, 1989, drawing a huge viewing audience, earning numerous awards, and reviving both the television Western and the miniseries. The novel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Best Novel.
Over the years, I read more of McMurtry’s works: Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen and In a Narrow Grave. Recently, I read McMurtry’s anthology of contemporary Western stories, Still Wild, (you can read my review here) so I decided to read a couple more McMurtry books I’ve had on my shelves for years.
Books: A Memoir (2008) is an entertaining guide through a life-time of reading. McMurtry starts with his reading interests in childhood and ramps up the obsession with reading and buying books–he eventually owns a bookstore–with the true motivations of a collector. “Today the only book in my 28,000 volumes to survive from that year is a little book in the New Directions Classics series: Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, a book I still reread every five years or so.” (p. 71)
Literary Life: A Second Memoir (2009) expands on McMurtry’s first memoir. McMurtry describes his struggles as a writer…and bookstore owner. I enjoyed McMurtry’s frankness about his personality and his view of the world. “I have never been good with groups, and the PEN board, to its credit, was a fervent and passionate group. I admired their passion but never shared it: I’m just too much of a Hobbesian.” (p. 139)
“V. S. Naipaul is obviously a great writer, but his genius is mostly to manifest itself in his nonfiction, not his fiction. This a touchy point with writers who consider themselves novelists first. Suggesting that tie nonfiction is really better will usually be taken as a deadly insult. Yet I think it’s true of James Baldwin as well as Norman Mailer, none of whose novels equal the great ‘reportage’ he did in the Sixties and Seventies. (The exception is his masterpiece, The Executioner’s Song, which is so good it doesn’t matter which genre one puts it in.)” (p. 173)
Reading Larry McMurtry’s insights on writers just delights me! I’m sure you would find McMurtry’s opinions fun, too! GRADE: A (for both books)
Thanks to Jeff Smith’s recommendation, I watched a few episodes of Wolf Like Me on Peacock and can’t wait to watch more!
Gary (Josh Gad) is a single father living in Adelaide, Australia with his troubled 11-year-old daughter Emma (Ariel Donoghue). Both father and daughter are still traumatized by the death of Emma’s mother, Lisa, who died of aggressive cancer.
Gary and Emma meet Mary (Isla Fisher), a quirky advice columnist recovering from the death of her husband. But despite Mary’s attempts to stay away from Gary, they keep meeting again and again.
While Gary struggles to help Emma with her problems, Mary is able to connect with Emma in an effortless fashion. However, Mary hides a dark secret that she fears might hurt Gary and Emma: she is a werewolf. If you’re in the mood for an off-beat rom com with supernatural elements, give Wolf Like Me a try. GRADE: Incomplete, but trending towards a B+
A few months ago I read Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson’s Sisterhood of Dune (you can read my review here). The sequel, Mentats of Dune (2014), continues the struggle between the various powers in the human Empire after the defeat of the thinking machines with the Butlerian Jihad.
With the anti-technology Butlerian forces of Manford Torondo growing in strength and influence, Prince Roderick Corrino sees a threat to the Imperial power of his brother, Emperor Salvador. Industrialist Josef Venport battles Manfred Torondo and his millions of believers, whose interference thwarts Venport’s business interests by restricting use of technology.
After the destruction of the Bene Gesserit school, Gilbertus Albans fears his Mentat School–training human computers–on Lampadas will be next. And Albans hides the secret copy of the thinking machine Erasmus that Torondo is obsessed with.
Although Brian Herbert & Anderson can’t match the baroque writing of Frank Hebert, they do manage to capture the complexity of the Dune world view. GRADE: B+
I started listening to Soul Music as a kid in the 1960s. Motown was my favorite record company. I loved Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, and Dusty Springfield. I listened to the Supremes, the Ronettes, and The Temptations. I wanted to be one of the Four Tops!
This 4 CD set delivers plenty of hits from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The songs in the 1990s seem more repetitive and more focused on loud voices than lyrics. Are you a fan of Soul Music? Any favorites here? GRADES: 1960s-A, 1970s-B+, 1980s-B, 1990s-B-
