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Books

Black Beard on Writer’s Block

February 23, 2010

Perhaps you noticed last week that I posted only one column in this space, rather than my usual two.  This was because I was struck with a bout of writer’s block when I woke up Thursday, which put a stop to everything.  Yes, I was frustrated, but at the same time I am entirely fascinated [...]

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Black Beard Explains How to Write Realistic Fiction and That’s All

February 12, 2010

So far, I’ve been able to avoid spending an entire post ruminating on the process of writing fiction.  It’s true, I suppose, that in a way everything I’ve discussed is somehow related to my views on the creative process, but I have not, until today, explicitly stated how I think one should go about writing [...]

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Black Beard Explains the Meaning of Greatness as it Pertains to William Faulkner

February 9, 2010

William Faulkner is the greatest American writer of the 20th Century.  On the face of it, this doesn’t seem to be the kind of profound statement one could build an entire column around, and yet after finishing The Collected Stories of William Faulkner last week, I was so moved by the thorough mastery and brilliance [...]

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Black Beard Uses Orhan Pamuk as an Excuse to Talk About Himself

February 6, 2010

This week I began reading Other Colors, the collection of essays, speeches, and other non-fiction writing by the Nobel Prize winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk.  It’s a fine book, not really exceptional but enjoyable enough that I continued reading past the first page. However, the good-but-not-great quality of Pamuk’s writing in this instance drew my [...]

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E-Readers are the Future of Book Publishing But Will Never Replace Actual Books for Black Beard

February 2, 2010

As long as books continue to be released in their current form, I will never buy an iPad, Kindle, or Sony Reader. I readily acknowledge that digital copies are superior to paperbacks when it comes to storage, transportation, and research (searchable online copies of Ulysses alone have saved me hours of time spent looking up [...]

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Black Beard Offers Praise and Criticism for the Dead

January 29, 2010

J.D. Salinger died on Wednesday, and so did Howard Zinn.  Their deaths are interestingly coincidental in that both writers share the commonality of having their careers defined by a single book—The Catcher in the Rye and A People’s History of the United States respectively—and also in the opposite ways each author handled the success of [...]

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Black Beard Fixes the Pulitzer Prize and the Academy Awards and Still Finds Time to Mock Post-Modern Literature

January 26, 2010

What is it about Modernist Literature that makes it superior to most contemporary novels?  The material.  True, I find much to dislike in the stylistic trends of Post-Modernists—the derivative experimentalism, the ironic pose assumed in narration, the weird character names—but none of this is quite so offensive as the lack of depth, both in the [...]

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Black Beard’s Review of Trite and Dubious Behavior: Tiger Woods

January 22, 2010

I’m not going to write about literature today. Instead, I’m going to write about Tiger Woods, who was pictured on the cover of the New York Post yesterday outside of, if the press is to be believed, a rehabilitation center for sexual addiction (I refuse to link to the photo, as way of setting the [...]

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Black Beard Explains How Novels Differ From Derivative Financial Instruments

January 19, 2010

Since the United States economy nearly collapsed in 2008, economics and finance have become a hobby of mine (if you’re interested, Frontline offers a good explanation of how the economy fell apart, here, and This American Life has an amazing story about what led up to the breaking point, here.) In studying what happened, I’ve become [...]

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Black Beard’s Review of Books No One Wants to Read: War and Peace

January 14, 2010

I love long books by good writers.  I love being invested in something long and complicated and ultimately rewarding.  In fact, when I’m reading something I enjoy and it ends at less than four hundred pages, I feel a little cheated.  This, however, is only true of novels.  I hate long movies.  I’m one of [...]

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