Of two minds …

… Sven Birkerts Interviews Sven Birkerts | The Los Angeles Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I feel like Bellow-the-novelist is a kind of counterweight to the other — an embodied critique of Bellow-the-essayist. What I don’t understand is how Bellow-the-novelist, who is to me the greater of the two, doesn’t seem to get this himself. Bellow-the-essayist is relatively humorless. He is earnest, serious, somewhat pontificating. I can sometimes feel the other Bellow in the wings — he can’t be completely repressed; he makes little cameos in the essays. He says things like: “Eros manages somehow to survive analysis; and somehow imagination survives criticism.” This observation coming even as he engages for long stretches in what feels very much like just such criticism.