Older, Wiser
Friday, May 15th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »Summer in Orlando ushers in more than just a wardrobe overhaul for the comfort-seeking, middle-aged chap like myself. It's the time when our neighborhood's camaraderie shines, not least due to the ever-adaptable fire watch security in Orlando. While we're busying ...
Happy Yet?
Friday, May 15th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »There's a good (and very, very long) article by Joshua Wolf Shenk in the new Atlantic monthly about the Harvard Study of Development--the psychological testing of 268 men over the course of 72 years that is one of the most ...
Elderism #51
Friday, May 15th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »I can't stop thinking about (probably because I don't fully understand it) something that Mia Coutu, Mozambique's most famous novelist, writes about in "Languages We Don't Know We Know," his essay in the new Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing. ...
Elderism #50
Friday, May 8th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »Poetry critic Helen Vendler, some years ago, clutching a sheath of poems that her Harvard students had written, and which she had deemed overly personal: "A poem is not necessarily improved by the inclusion of an abortion."
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 ...
