Archive for May, 2009

Elderism #49

Friday, May 8th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Music phenom Pete Seeger, who turned 90 last week: "I'm not really enthusiastic about big things. I think if there's a world here in 100 years, it's going to be saved by millions of little things."

John Cheever’s *Other* Secret Life

Friday, May 8th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

John Cheever's tortured bisexuality gets some more airtime in Blake Bailey's new Cheever biography, Matthew Price reminds us in Bookforum. Price quotes two of the sadder bits of Cheever's journals--"The most wonderful thing about life is that we hardly tap ...

Elderism #48

Friday, May 8th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, quoted in Dwight Garner's Times review of "My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness," which is probably the first biography of a Palestinian writer to be published in English: "The more mosques, the less poetry."

Elderism #47

Friday, May 8th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author of "Things Fall Apart," in an essay in the  new "Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing," edited by Rob Spillman: "Of course there are areas of Africa where colonialism divided up a ...

Strange Dream

Friday, May 1st, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

I typically forget, or discard, all memories of dreams that I have, as they tend to be so obvious in their meaning as to suggest a total lack of imagination. But the weirder ones hold a certain sway. Last night ...

I Must Go On/I Cannot Go On

Friday, May 1st, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

There's an interesting article about obituaries by someone named Stefany Anne Golberg in "The Smart Set," Drexel University's magazine. Pointing to the current flowering of, and interest in,  obits as a literary form--if not up to the level of the ...