Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.

It's funny to be a critic.

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper.

Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend.

I have, I admit, a low tolerance for detached chronicling and cool analysis.

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.