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Like Fire
If you must, you may call me a dog lover, but the truth is I haven’t partnered up with a pooch since my childhood sidekick Bessie, female runt of a German shepherd litter. (It’s said German shepherds were renamed Alsatians in the aftermath of Word War I to render them more politically palatable to the [...]
Read MoreReaders and fans of William Gaddis, a writer notoriously protective of his privacy during his lifetime, have been waiting years to read his correspondence. A number of pieces were collected in Conjunctions this past fall, and finally next month Dalkey Archive Press will publish The Letters of William Gaddis, edited by Steven Moore with an [...]
Read MoreThe week, my workweek, has been all about numbers. Though we usually perform a budget review one-half the way through our fiscal year, business has been, well, busy and we’ve only now just paused, about two-thirds of the way in. If you’ve taught a child to cross the street, you could do a budget review, [...]
Read MoreWhen Russian writers come up in conversation, as they are wont to, you can always count on someone—or an entire chorus—admitting to huge gaps in their reading and confiding that they really need to address the situation. I know because I’m one of them. I fully intend to read War and Peace and Anna Karenina [...]
Read MoreChange was the watchword for these several recent days. Well, when is change ever not the way things are? It never ends. And so, I take great comfort from the three stanzas of Joyce Sutphen’s poem, Living in the Body, which parallel news and views that have been shared with me lately: Body is something [...]
Read MoreWell, OK. It was Valentine’s Day. But I’m not going to feel too bad about missing most of it because I’m fully with Lorenz Hart on this one: Each day is Valentine’s Day. And that goes in both directions: If you have someone you love and cherish, no need to set aside one particular day [...]
Read MoreThis day is full of bulletins / pungent with warnings / turgid with urgency. Even the normally tranquil Oxford English Dictionary defines blizzard as “A furious blast of frost-wind and blinding snow, in which man and beast frequently perish”. Yikes. In the interest of safety, then, I am jumping offline and fleeing homeward to my [...]
Read MoreLooks like we’re going to get a little weather here on the east coast this weekend. Which doesn’t sound too distressing, honestly… there’s a bag and a half of rock salt in the garage, we had the roof patched this past fall, and—that ageless refrain—I have plenty to read. Granted, much of it is required, [...]
Read MoreThe only trouble about this town is, that it is too large. You cannot accomplish anything in the way of business, you cannot even pay a friendly call, without devoting a whole day to it—that is, what people call a whole day who do not get up early. Many business men only give audience from [...]
Read MoreIt has been more than thirty concentric rings ago, but I remember the phrase very clearly. One of my professors, during an annual evaluation, offered a cleverly thesauric observation about my youthful demeanor and collegiate presence: “[he] tends to be wooden.” Even allowing for my customary quiet nature, youthful immaturity, and a somewhat tamped-down personality, [...]
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