Author Archives: James Mustich

On the essays of James Baldwin. Evidence and Eloquence On the essays of James Baldwin. It can be a little too easy to pin labels on James Baldwin: black, gay, expatriate, aesthete. But every label sells him short, diminishing the singularity of his work. That he wrote specifically of his time and place—America in the […]

Sonnets on a bookstore’s demise, 1990. ​1 Over a shoulder, through the humming cloud,A newspaper focuses my attentionUpon a quiet headline with its mentionOf City’s Oldest Bookstore, Shutting Down. Imagining a map, I scour the townBut the damned store eludes my apprehension —Aloft in our Florida-bound suspensionI wish my fellow passenger would read aloud. No […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. We invest all creation stories (large and small, universal and individual) with our sense of time, so that every birth is a beginning rather than a revelation, every death an ending rather than a return to the dark waters from which life sprang. Despite the solemn invocations of […]

The allure of dictionaries. I suspect my antennae were alert to Elisabeth Murray’s book because I’ve been using much of the time reclaimed these past several weeks from commuting, and from both the purposeful and the pointless scurrying allowed by the freedom to go anywhere at any time, to dawdle in dictionaries, weighing words and tracing their […]

On the trail of the OED. One book my eye alighted on as I worked in the basement last week, when I lifted my eye from my laptop and looked to the left, was Caught in the Web of Words, K. M. Elisabeth Murray’s biography of her grandfather, James A. H. Murray, founding editor and guiding […]

My back pages, basement edition. I didn’t expect to be spending so much time in my basement this spring. Displaced from my usual working space upstairs by another family member during our time of surreally pleasant and preternaturally anxious lockdown, I set up a desk (read: cleared off the flotsam and jetsam that the tides […]

Face to face with destiny. In the glass she wore an expression of tense melancholy, for she had come to the depressing conclusion, since the arrival of the Dalloways, that her face was not the face she wanted, and in all probability never would be. However, punctuality has been impressed upon her, and whatever face […]

From a notebook: On War and Peace, 3 “Everything flows; nothing remains,” is how Guy Davenport rendered the most famous maxim of Heraclitus, immediately annotating his translation with bracketed alternatives—“[Everything moves; nothing is still. Everything passes away; nothing lasts.]”—and following these with a formulation nearly as well known: “One cannot step twice into the same […]

A reflection from A Month of Sundays. We are familiar with the state of grace (or at least with the idea of it), but that other states—of despair, for instance, or melancholy, or bewilderment and anxiety or even gladness—might be conditions of the soul, a possession by divine or cosmological promise of our inmost intelligence, […]

From a notebook: On War and Peace, 2 Near the midpoint of War and Peace, Tolstoy offers a key to the book’s concerns: the significance of its “war” belongs not to campaigns against Napoleon nor to the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino, so vividly sketched in its chapters; neither does the meaning of its “peace” […]