William James has some serious issues with brother Henry James’ writing

I initially set out to record Henry James’ somewhat condescending response to Walter Besant’s very pretentious essay “The Art of Fiction”

Until I discovered the letter from Henry James’ older brother, and renowned psychologist/philosopher, William James, where he tells Henry exactly how he feels about Henry’s latest release “The American Scene.”

Spoiler alert: It’s definitely not a 5-star review…

Being the father of two sons, I know how brothers can be not only brutally frank and painfully honest to one another, but also highly competitive and a bit boastful as well.

The older brother’s letter to the younger encompasses all that and more.



Check out my youtube channel and like and subscribe and yada yada yada and peristaltic belching…

Better yet, how about reading and reviewing my latest novel?

Literary Zen XV

For many people art means rose-coloured windows, and selection means picking a bouquet for Mrs. Grundy. They will tell you glibly that artistic considerations have nothing to do with the disagreeable, with the ugly; they will rattle off shallow commonplaces about the province of art and the limits of art, till you are moved to some wonder in return as to the province and the limits of ignorance.

Henry James

Slowing Down the Synapses

Or, Speeding Up the Reviews

Not the primary reason but one of the reasons I decided back in April to take a hiatus from the web was because I wanted to give my brain a break from all the nonsensical chatter that was cluttering it so.

I have been having what I collectively call chemo brain issues for quite some time so I thought it may do me some good to lay off for a while all the hyper-clicking and attention-span deflating skim-reading that the web so sweetly and successfully induces us into doing and which studies have told us is altering our brain and its ability to focus on and process information.

To counter what seemed to me to be my lack of focus and ability to process effectively process information (perhaps less a result from all my web time and more a result from all the chemo and prednisone I used to be strung out on years ago (and, in the case of chemo, which I still take daily dose addiction of)), I decided to turned off the web for a while.

Which, for the most part, I did surprisingly enough.

To fill the time I no longer spent on the web, much of which had been dedicated to this blog, I mobilized the pen and cracked open the books pretty hard.

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