Skip to content

Tim Miller

Poetry, Religion, History and Art

  • Recent Work
  • Contact / My Books
  • Readings
  • Index
  • Human Voices Wake Us (Podcast)
  • The Old Archive

Tag: Novels

11 Oct 201910 Oct 2019Tim Miller

Dostoevsky’s Nightmare

Raskolnikov’s horrible dream, from early on in Crime & Punishment: Raskolnikov had a fearful dream. He dreamt he was back in his childhood in the little town of his birth. He was a child about seven years old, walking into the country with his father on the evening of a holiday. It was a grey […]

Continue Reading "Dostoevsky’s Nightmare"
26 Jul 201910 Aug 2021Tim Miller

How Alice Munro Chose to Write Short Stories

  from the introduction to her Selected Stories: I did not “choose” to write short stories. I hoped to write novels. When you are responsible for running a house and taking care of small children, particularly in the days before disposable diapers or ubiquitous automatic washing machines, it’s hard to arrange for large chunks of […]

Continue Reading "How Alice Munro Chose to Write Short Stories"
25 Jul 201924 Jul 2019Tim Miller

The Best of Albert Camus’s Notebooks

A random scattering, some barely aphorisms, from the first two volumes of the notebooks of Albert Camus. They are gold: One must not cut oneself off from the world. No one who lives in the sunlight makes a failure of his life. My whole effort, whatever the situation, misfortune or disillusion, must be to make […]

Continue Reading "The Best of Albert Camus’s Notebooks"
17 Jul 201910 Aug 2021Tim Miller

There is Only the Trying: Some Thoughts on Fame & Failure

A reader favorite from 2016, that I like to repost now & then: 1. When Derek Jeter retired from baseball in the fall of 2014, those who followed his last season heard the unsurprising story that he’d wanted to be shortstop for the New York Yankees since he was a little boy. And as I […]

Continue Reading "There is Only the Trying: Some Thoughts on Fame & Failure"
16 May 201915 May 2019Tim Miller

Philip Roth Mourns the Behemoth of Pop Culture

from a 2006 interview: “… television began in 1948, really, and Popular Culture just grew and grew and grew and grew, and by the time I was in college, or in graduate school at the University of Chicago, David Riesman was there, and he was writing The Lonely Crowd, you remember. And I used to […]

Continue Reading "Philip Roth Mourns the Behemoth of Pop Culture"
15 May 201913 May 2019Tim Miller

William Blake Chooses Eternity

A wonderful paragraph from Peter Ackroyd’s biography of William Blake, where he shows how the poet slowly came to accept that if he was writing for anyone other than himself, it was for posterity; and how he charged ahead nevertheless: His independence meant that he could preserve his vision beyond all taint—and that integrity is […]

Continue Reading "William Blake Chooses Eternity"
10 Apr 20198 Apr 2019Tim Miller

If you only read one page from “Moby-Dick”…

…it might as well be this passage from late in the book, when Ahab and Starbuck almost give up their chase for the whale so that they can look “into a human eye” again. Memories of family, love and a sane life almost convinces Ahab, but the effort fails, and the obsession continues: Starbuck saw […]

Continue Reading "If you only read one page from “Moby-Dick”…"
29 Mar 201910 Aug 2021Tim Miller

The Palace of Winds (rereading “The English Patient”)

Our love for certain books or movies or pieces of music are so intense that we like to imagine our preference for them rises to the level of objectivity. The wonderfully grouchy critic Harold Bloom, for instance, praises the poetry of Hart Crane to no end; but, just as effusively, he can relate the memory […]

Continue Reading "The Palace of Winds (rereading “The English Patient”)"
14 May 201627 Jul 2018Tim Miller

Classic Joyce

Too much to choose from, but here’s some classic bits from James Joyce that are always worth keeping in mind: On Writing: “Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people […]

Continue Reading "Classic Joyce"

Notes from the Grid: The Perpetual Adolescent - Human Voices Wake Us

Preorder print copies of Notes from the Grid here. https://wordandsilence.com/human-voices-wake-us/ For the next month or so, I will be reading a short book of essays, Notes from the Grid, that I have been writing since 2006. Tonight, I read the sixth and seventh (which begins at 20:30). Spirit Murmur, the album of string quartet music I mention in the episode, composed by Alan Hovhaness and performed by the Shanghai Quartet, can be purchased here. As always, send any comments to humanvoiceswakeus1@gmail.com. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/humanvoiceswakeus/support
  1. Notes from the Grid: The Perpetual Adolescent 51:19
  2. Notes from the Grid: All Things Can Console 42:32
  3. Notes from the Grid: To Criticize the Critic 37:58
  4. Notes from the Grid: Rediscovering the Hidden Life 38:38
  5. Walt Whitman's Mystical Poetry 02:02:26

Books

To the House of the Sun: A Poem
Bone Antler Stone: Poems
Hymns & Lamentations
The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old: Stories

Categories

  • 20th Century Poetry
  • Bone Antler Stone
  • Essays
  • Evolution
  • Fiction
  • History
  • Human Voices Wake Us
  • Hymns & Lamentations
  • Images
  • Interviews
  • Poetry
  • Religion/Myth
  • Seamus Heaney
  • Tao Te Ching
  • The Great Myths
  • The Lonely Young & the Lonely Old
  • To the House of the Sun
  • Week of the Bomb
  • Week of Van Gogh
  • Wordsworth's 1805 Prelude
  • Writers/Artists

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 7,105 other followers

Top Posts & Pages

  • Heaney’s Bog Poems
  • Classic Jam Hits
  • Young Krishna & the Universe in His Mouth
  • Kafka’s Diaries
  • Joyce's Dirty Letters
  • The Great Myths #7: The Tree of Souls (Jewish)
  • The Great Myths #49: Odin Sacrifices Himself (Norse)
  • T. S. Eliot on Dante
  • The State of Poetry ... in 1993
  • The Great Myths #31: The Child Krishna & the Universe in His Mouth (Hindu)

Recent Posts

  • Notes from the Grid: The Perpetual Adolescent (podcast)
  • Notes from the Grid: Everything Can Console (podcast)
  • Notes from the Grid: To Criticize the Critic (podcast)
  • Notes from the Grid: Rediscovering the Hidden life (podcast)
  • Walt Whitman’s Mystical Poetry (podcast)

Archives

  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • February 2021
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • December 2015
  • July 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • October 2013
  • August 2013
  • May 2013
  • December 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
Blog at WordPress.com.
  • Follow Following
    • Tim Miller
    • Join 7,105 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Tim Miller
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

You must be logged in to post a comment.