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Official Green Lantern Trailer Hits

by Red Beard on November 16, 2010

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Black Beard Returns With Advice For Young Writers: You’re Going To Be Poor And Probably Never Succeed

by Black Beard on August 19, 2010

When the AWP conference was held in New York City a few years ago, I attended a discussion panel focused on the ways an up and coming writer could make a living without going into academia. At one point during the question and answer period a young woman, apparently dissatisfied with the advice given thus ...

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Black Beard Gloats: In Your Face, Print Media!

by Black Beard on July 1, 2010

When I was traveling through the Midwest about a month ago, I randomly took a copy of the Wall Street Journal from the lobby of my hotel on the way out one morning, and on the front page was an article about the growing popularity of digital books. The reporting focused specifically on the rise ...

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Black Beard’s Review of Contemporary Fiction and Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle and Flannery O’Connor

by Black Beard on June 25, 2010

In Poetics, Aristotle offers two valuable observations about the creation of art. First, and most significantly, Aristotle tells us "not to know that a hind has no horns is a less serious matter than to paint it inartistically". In other words, it is less important for a writer not to be fully informed about the ...

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The First Trailer for Seth Rogen/Michel Gondry’s The Green Hornet

June 23, 2010
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Black Beard’s Guide To Establishing A Foundation For Your Literary Arrogance and Condescension

June 18, 2010

Recently a friend asked me to make a list of books I would recommend for someone who would like to read some serious literature, and in doing so, I realized that a list like this could serve as a useful primer for anyone who reads what I write in this space. That being said, what [...]

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Black Beard on Literary Criticism Now And In The 24th Century

June 16, 2010

I’m always interested in tracing the lineage of art, of finding an indication of what influenced an artist, and of discovering what aspects of a past novel, for instance, have been adopted and repeated by contemporary novelists. It’s a small thing, but I feel as though I more thoroughly understand Philip Roth’s American Pastoral when [...]

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Black Beard’s Review of Books He Doesn’t Want to Read: The Corrections

April 14, 2010

I’ve been reading Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. What can I say? Or, really, where should I begin? It’s a Post-Modern novel, by which I mean that it’s not terribly dense, nor terribly engrossing, nor terribly interesting. In fact, in an earlier draft I wrote of this post I found the process of breaking down the [...]

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Black Beard’s Review of Books No One Wants to Read: The Good Soldier

March 23, 2010

I was recently accepted to a PhD program I applied to at the end of last year, and as part of my acceptance, I’ve been awarded a teaching fellowship. At first I will be given only freshman composition courses, but as I gain more experience I will have the opportunity in subsequent years to oversee [...]

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Black Beard’s Review of Books No One Wants to Read: Raymond Carver

March 9, 2010

I just finished Other Colors by Orhan Pamuk, which I’ve mentioned briefly before, but which I would like to write about again, in a way, because of many topics covered in the book to which I responded.  For example, Pamuk writes in several places about returning later in life to books he read in his [...]

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