Partially Congealed Pundit « The Hooded Utilitarian

Go and Stop Chasing

Comparing the poetry of Basho and Ryokan.

Ancient Zen Battle

Alan Watts’ Way of Zen vs. Eugene Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery

August 7, 2010
By Noah Berlatsky
Article, Blog
65 comments

I wrote this almost twenty years ago for a course on representations of war when I was a junior in college. It touches on some issues raised in the comments section of Alex Buchet’s recent post on war comics, so I thought I’d resurrect it. I think I still agree with the main points, though [...]

May 14, 2010
By Noah Berlatsky
Blog
no comments

Superheroes I Have Known

A couple people (okay, one person) have asked about this zine recently, so I thought I’d put it online. It’s from 2002, back before I started doing criticism and became all bitter and cheerless and old.

Partially Congealed Pundit: A to Z

I wrote these all between 2000 and 2004 or so. Anthropology A to Z Analyzing bigamy, chiropractors dissecting Ethiopians find gratuitous horniness. “Inferior jism kills,” lament medical non-Negroes. “Our prostitutes qualmlessly relish sable, towering usufructuaries.” Vampire-vivisectionist-vasectomites want xenopotency — yea, zoöplasty. Grants A to Z Argh. Bastard coins demand enthusiastic flim-flam, genuflecting horse-pucky — iterated. [...]

Partially Congealed Pundit: Statement of Purpose, first try

Last week I printed the Statement of Purpose I sent to MFA programs in 1998. Below is the one I sent in 1997. (I like the 1998 one better, I think…though among MFA program evaluators, both were greeted with equal indifference, as far as I could tell.) _____________________ Statement of Purpose I plan to write [...]

Partially Congealed Pundit: Statement of Purpose

I wrote this in 1998, I think, when I was unsuccessfully applying to MFA programs. I actually used this as my Statement of Purpose. It was published in the Chicago Review a couple of years later. ______________________________ Statement of Purpose (adapted from The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron with [...]