California Literary Review

Web Site:

http://www.jfkessler.com/

Books on Amazon:

An Egyptian Bondage and Other Stories
Face Of Creation
Tahirih: A Portrait in Poetry: Selected Poems of Qurratu'l-'Ayn
Siren Songs & Classical Illusions
Christmas Carols and Other Plays
Collected Poems
Our Bearings at Sea: A Novel-In-Poems
Rapid Transit
Tataga's Children
Sophocles, 2 : King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone (Penn Greek Drama Series)

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

• Terrors on Terra
  Posted on 21 Aug 2007 in Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  How grotesque it must have sounded to a child, and how frightening. Outdoors, the sun of Southern California sparkles on the watered green lawn; within, the house is tranquil. And here in this pleasant kitchen sit two grownups, his grandparents, filling the day’s bright first hour with descriptions of disasters around the globe, massacres marching on to catastrophes and death by the thousands. And then these same grownups fold their papers, rise smiling and replete from the table to drive off to work as usual.

• Is There a Doctor in the House?
  Posted on 07 Aug 2007 in Biography, Movies, Movies & TV
  

  She smoked a lot, but she laughed a lot too. I could easily support her, I was at thirteen, a good two heads taller — she even looked like Betty Boop! And when her lady partner went ahead or loitered poking through the rough in search of another lost ball, Miss Rothschild would walk on with me, linking my elbow gaily, helping me along. “My poor caddie has to carry my clubs!” she’d wail. And there, at 11 in the morning under that bright, glancing sunlight, facing into the brisk mountain breeze, I’d get a whiff of lipstick and whiskey-tainted breath, mingled with her flossy perfume, her laughter enveloping me in a mist of genial, confusing sensuality. She liked to tease: she set anyone and everyone up, her friends male and female alike; she even set me up. Pixyish, it seemed that was the word for it … yet that “it” always eluded me.

• Once Upon A Time
  Posted on 13 Jun 2007 in Children's Literature, Linguistics, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  Suppose one’s made a viable, literate translation that succeeds in conveying the narrative or expository sense of an original. What if it turns out that one’s own culture resists it, and refuses to receive it?

• Centuria: 100 Ouroboric Novels by Giorgio Manganelli
  Posted on 10 Apr 2007 in Fiction Reviews, Short Stories
  

  Americans in this therapy-mad epoch tend to take, rather mistake, an “experience” for that fateful “event.” Perusing Centuria, we may come to understand that the myriad catastrophes blazoned in newspapers and splashed over our screens — love, celebrity, athletic prowess, failure or fame, marriage, illness, crisis, smashup — do not concern the soul; nor can they illuminate whatever meaning life might propose.

• Between Alpha and Omega: Some Observations on Poetry and Poetry’s Task in our Time
  Posted on 26 Mar 2007 in Literary Themes, Non-Fiction Reviews, Poetry
  

  We lived heretofore in the multitude of villages scattered world-wide amongst the ruins of the Tower of Babel. Civilization’s tapestry, its complicated patterns interwoven from multitudes of poets and poetries, once covered their walls and held our attention. Will there come to be in the global village but one faceless, boring bard who speaks with the reduced, infinitely reductive voice the simplified and platitudinous messages of the Media?

• Archival Culture(s)
  Posted on 26 Mar 2007 in Anthropology, Education, Literary Themes, Non-Fiction Reviews, Sociology
  

  It is scarcely news that in a vast, pluralistic country like the United States, minorities should feel themselves threatened with absorption into the larger society, and that they should cling to some form of cultural identity. It begins poignantly when school children pledge allegiance to “ … one nation, indivisible, with freedom and justice [...]

• Dianetics: A Dialogue
  Posted on 26 Mar 2007 in Biography, Non-Fiction Reviews, Religion
  

  “You clear me? I clear you? It’s not hypnotism, if that’s what scares you. You’re fully conscious. You merely learn how to scan your tapes. Then you’ll be getting full recalls in real time. Visio, sonic, tactilic, and olofactoric. Kinesthetic — which is weight and motion. Somatic — that’s pain. Thermic and organic — your insides. In Dianetics, organic is also emotive. The fact is, you don’t cry because you’re sad. You’re sad because you’re crying. Emotion is physical, not mental like that spooky Freudian stuff.”

• A Long Day’s Day with James Dickey
  Posted on 26 Mar 2007 in Biography, Non-Fiction Reviews, Writers
  

  “Ah yes,” he whispered to me, ”I spent one helluva long night wrassling all over the floor of a room there with one terrific Jew gal. You know Susan Sontag?” “Personally, no, I never met her, though I’ve read her.” “Well, that novel,” he chortled, “that opening … in the abandoned railway tunnel? That was me! That shadow man; that spook; that brute. None other than Jim Dickey! One helluva a long night that was, boy, lemmee tell you!”

• Frau Braun and The Tiger of Auschwitz
  Posted on 26 Mar 2007 in Biography, Germany, History, Israel, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  The principal accused was an Auschwitz commandant, one Wilhelm Boger, whose sobriquet was “The Tiger of Auschwitz.” He was a man who had been arrested after a successful post-war career, having become a rich businessman who’d never been questioned before. At that time he was in his late 60s. Of the many witnesses for the prosecution there was a woman called Frau Braun.

• No Heroes Need Apply
  Posted on 26 Mar 2007 in Literary Themes, Mythology, Non-Fiction Reviews
  

  By the time we come to T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway in the 1920’s, we find a hero characteristic of the period of entre les deux guerres: he is either passive and/or maimed in his masculinity; that is, fatally in his (phallic) heroism.