Стало известно, что Дмитрий Евгеньевич Галковский хвастается своей способностью “за неделю довести до слёз и нервного срыва любого”.

В связи с нынешней годовщиной рождения создателя прообраза подпольного типа Дмитрия Евгеньевича, я объявляю следующий вызов ( Read more... )

― for P.N.  
I have held off this response as long as I could. I do not and cannot expect it to serve as a peace missive. But I make every effort to soften the blows that I must dispense. I am hoping to factor out emotions like jealousy or anger. Not that I lack such responses to your bid to inflate your literary stature at my expense. The ( Read more... )

― for T.H. Chance

There is but one truly serious moral problem, and it is that of apology. To make an apology, man must both acknowledge an external standard and defer to it. This much is easily attained. The hard part comes in requiring that his deference be both sincere and spontaneous. ( Read more... )

Come, come, and sit you down. You shall not budge.
You do not go till I set you up a glass
Where you may see the inmost part of you.
    I would like to go on record explaining my reference to Phil Nikolayev’s detractors as douchebags. ( Read more... )

― for P.N.

I am tardy with you, because I have sought what I had forgotten, here and there, consigned to the Usenet, of your erstwhile obiter dicta. Herewith a response based on the next to nothing that I found. I shall abide by your request to withhold poetic criticism, not because I agree with your insistence that it is beyond my ken, but ( Read more... )

    Now that I have your letter, I understand both your reluctance to send it, and your delay in doing so. The former reflects my own resistance to reopening the subject so thoroughly excavated in our collegiate dialectics thirteen years ago. I refuse to mirror the latter in delaying this response, begging only your forgiveness for casting it in ( Read more... )

    I am writing down this response to your criticism. It is overdue by eleven months. Last time we saw each other after my father’s death, you gave me its gist. At that time, I had not yet resumed my writing. But you were already entitled to your opinion. We had known and supported each other through similar peripeties: your divorce and remarriage ( Read more... )

    The sources of Rousseau’s success are instructive. His was, and remains, the earliest and the greatest of all tales of self-consecration. The idea of the writer immortalizing himself through his work is as old as Horace. The idea of the writer immortalizing his work through his life is entirely modern. It is tempting to wax paradoxical in ( Read more... )

    Michael once heard a man boast of never having had to masturbate. What the braggart had attributed to a surfeit of opportunity, was clearly owed to a want of libido. As goes intercourse, so does interlocution. Writing for no particular recipient is to verbal communication as masturbation is to sex. All the more so if the writer’s aim is ( Read more... )