One of the gifts fiction gives us is the ability to break down all pretensions. Under the gaze of the critical authorial eye, something of the complexes that underpin each life can be given free rein. Through fiction, we find that translators and interpreters (who we may assume lead lives of some glamour given their…

Perhaps surprisingly, New Year Resolutions are welcome in this house. While not ignoring their arbitrary nature there is surely value in offering everyone a chance at a clean slate, no matter how temporary it may be. If this time of year and the goals people set themselves result in even marginal positive gains, there should…

I was listening to an Australia-based podcast yesterday. It concerns itself with literature, choosing as its guests a wide variety of authors/academics/critics from around the world who typically grapple with writing at the margins. The conceit of the show caught my attention in a sea of audio dreck (big publications like the London Review of…

It continually impresses me how a single presence can so thoroughly interrupt the entire flow of everything going on around it. Even without meaning to, it enters a space and it is as if it is suddenly airless; nothing moves smoothly. The worst of it is, there is sense of active malice. Merely the meanness…

Survived another Secret Santa having given a fitting gift to another and having received something nice in return. Funnily enough, my mother-in-law pulled my name for gift giving — she did me a solid buying a collection of essays and the Complete Works of Alvaro de Campos, all from New Directions Publishing. The food, company,…

The Daily Note’s daily schedule lasted a total of two days. The end of an era. For what it’s worth, yesterday was spent packing and driving from Saint Paul to Sussex. You didn’t miss much. We’re in town for a little over a week for the holidays and spent our first day in paradise at…

Inspired to try and get back into this exercise by the example of that late scion of Portuguese literature, José Saramago. Late in life — the site started in September 2008, he died June 2010 — he decided to start his own blog. He posted to it daily, without pretense (inasmuch as that’s possible for…