David Guy

Notes Toward A Theory Of Pornography

I don’t believe that pornography creates a problem (that is, it doesn’t create a need for sexual fantasy) but that it reflects a problem, or rather, for me, not a problem but simply a fact: that a part of man’s make-up, a part of his sexual being, is this fantasy element.

Notes Toward A Psychology Of The Nuclear Age

I assume that at the site of a nuclear blast people would know literally nothing. One moment they would be living breathing human beings and the next moment they — and the landscape they inhabited — would not even be dust. Would there be any warning at all for such people? Does a missile even from far off make some sound that would warn them of their imminent death? (These are rhetorical questions. I really don’t care to know.) Of all the possibilities in a nuclear war, that has always seemed to me the most fortunate, to be at the site of the blast without warning and never know what hit you. Similarly, not to be at the exact site of the blast, but caught in the firestorm or the gale-like winds that surround it, might be a comparatively fortunate death in nuclear war. 

A Different World

The Sexual Politics of Ursula Le Guin

There is much to admire in these novels beyond the brilliance of their central conceptions. Their style is vivid but simple, utterly unpretentious, with the kind of transparency that reveals ideas in all their clarity. I can’t remember when I have done reading that is so satisfactory on an emotional level — telling a story I want to hear — and also on an intellectual level, provoking hours of thought beyond what the books even dealt with.

He Took The Doorknob With Him

Book Review

The real drama of his life took place as he entered the almost monastic study of his mansion — when he closed the door, he took the doorknob with him — and wrote with a creative fury that few other artists can even imagine. Even he was so busy as to hardly notice what he was doing, but in brief moments of repose he was aware of it.

Poet Of The Ordinary

Book Review

Yet the mansion of fiction has many rooms, and enough of even its greatest writers do not fit our preconceived molds. Goodman was not that streetcorner babbler, wrapped up in remembered and invented anecdote, but a thinker, an observer, a contemplator.

And Endless Sorrow

Book Review

There is an immense sadness to this book, especially at the end, but it is a sadness that is squarely faced and thus in a sense overcome. It is the sadness that the past inevitably has, that these things happened and those did not, a life was given to this and not to that, a happiness that seemed available was not achieved. It is a sadness that the reality of our lives always has, but to find it expressed with such clarity and poignance in a work of art is rare.

Mrs. Reilly And Her Little Ignatius

Book Review

A Confederacy of Dunces is most triumphantly a symphony of voices, a wonderfully wide range of authentic-sounding voices which would be distinctive even if they were never named.

Back From The Dead And Goofy As Ever

Book Review

Characters in the novels of Anne Tyler are imprisoned by people, places, things, by the whole fabric of their past lives, but they dream — some of them — of escaping. Their means of escape is through other people. They envision in the other a life more like the one they want to lead, and their decisions to change are sudden.

The Poor In Spirit, And The Rich

Book Review

Dr. Fischer is a dark God who grants us favors only at the cost of our humiliation, who eggs us on with snatches of happiness only in order to degrade us. He is a greedy God, as greedy as his creatures: he is greedy for our humiliation.

Wrinkled Little Man With Sad Eyes

Book Review

The mature work of Somerset Maugham is nothing if not honest. It moves on the weight of his blunt, plain sentences, which he delivers to the reader like so many body blows.