Archive for October, 2009

Elderism #70

Monday, October 12th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

"You have beautiful hands." -Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller, to a nurse who was cranking up his bed in a Naples hospital in 1994, hours before Steegmuller passed away at the age of 88.

How to Get Stuff Done

Sunday, October 11th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

"Every few years when it's been another five years that have passed and I haven't made a film and the depression starts taking over totally, I allow myself to do a commercial. And then I feel really dirty and get ...

Elderism #69

Friday, October 9th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

"I started it." -Elizabeth Taylor, beamingly, when told in 2006 that Julia Roberts was pulling down $20 million per film.

Wisdom: Does It Exist?

Friday, October 9th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

The quarterly journal, In Character, has an interesting mandate: each issue is devoted to an "everyday virtue" (past issues have included "Thrift," "Purpose," and "Grit.") This fall's issue is "Wisdom," and I was asked--along with a group of far-deeper-than-me folks ...

Elderism #68

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

"Love is a source of anxiety until it is a source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit." -Novelist Edmund White, as quoted in a Bloomberg.com review by Craig Seligman of White's new memoir, City Boy. Seligman: "What a blast it ...

Life After Death

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

I had a segment on public radio's Studio 360 this weekend about how the publisher, Scribner, has monkeyed with Ernest Hemingway's memoir, A Movable Feast. Now an article in the Wall Street Journal by Alexandra Alter tells us that the ...

Elderism #67

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

"I think of the days we were gods and goddesses, playing ball with planets. We were larger than dinosaurs. But now we sit like good girls and boys and watch the tennis ball going left and right, forgetting the days ...

McSweeney’s

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

I have a fairly nutty humor piece on the website of Dave Eggers's journal, McSweeney's, today (it is here.) It's called, "Fall Fashion Report from a Local Correctional Facility." It could not be gayer.

Elderism #66

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Wheelchair-bound after a 1990 car accident that cost him the use of both his legs, Bard professor Chinua Achebe, the author of the brutal and awesome Things Fall Apart, is releasing his first book in more than 20 years. An ...

Rewriting the Classics

Friday, October 2nd, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Writers and artists, take note: the publishing house Scribner recently published a "restored version" of Ernest Hemingway's memoir, A Moveable Feast, "restored" by Hemingway's grandson in such a way as to make the grandson's grandmother--Mrs. Hemingway #2--more sympathetic in the ...