Archive for September, 2009

Elderism #64

Friday, September 25th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

"Beautifully done." -The last words of English poet A.E. Housman in 1936, to his doctor, who was giving him a final injection of morphine.

Man on Fire

Friday, September 25th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

O, James Ellroy! Such a loveable nutjob are you! In his interview on public radio's Studio 360 last week, the author of L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia managed to 1) chastise his interviewer for interrupting him at one point, ...

Ring Nuts

Saturday, September 19th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Was it the gentleman seated next to me at the symposium who told me that he had six subscriptions to New York's Metropolitan Opera? Was it the gentleman who told me about how his seatmate at the Ring Cycle in Bayreuth, ...

Elderism #63

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

"[Y]ou can't expect bras necessarily on a clothesline. You have to go to Target to see bras hanging nobly out for the public gaze." From Nicholson Baker's new novel, The Anthologist

Elderism #62

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

"Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing. We've got to face that. And if that's true, do we want to give drugs so that people won't weep? No, because if we do, poetry will die. The rhyming of rhymes is ...

Elderism # 61

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

"I'm going to get in bed, and I don't have anyone to sleep with now, so what I do is I sleep with my books. And I know that's kind of weird and solitary and pathetic. But if you think ...

Edward M. Kennedy (1932-2009)

Sunday, September 6th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

In his new memoir, True Compass, we learn that Ted Kennedy, when trying to decide whether to run for Senate in 1962, remembered what his father had told him as a child: "You can have a serious life or a ...