Culver City Tolstoy is a figure I have always kept at arm’s length; beyond reading Anna Karenina (easily the greatest novel ever written; really no other deserves to be put in the same paragraph with it; I hated it) and the most famous short stories, I have mostly avoided him. That he was full of hatred and […]
Monthly Archives: March 2010
The Last Station.
17-Mar-10one-handed And gets a response. My general take on it: it’s about as useful and important as learning music. If you’re the kind of person who thinks we should just get rid of music, I think you’ll want to dump Latin too, and for the same reasons. One of the commenters asked, “I wonder how many […]
Reflections of an Artist.
16-Mar-10“My gift for composition is not the kind which will ever be ‘successful.’ It is far too subjective for that. When I was a boy I thought I would invent an altogether new art (it would be half-sculpture and half-music, I thought). I began with sculpture and as you know that turned out disastrously. But […]
The Neversink.
13-Mar-10March weather in the Catskills. Come quickly, spring!
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill.
12-Mar-10One of my friends, who is bemused by my general policy of abstinence from modern novels, walked me over to the Porter Square Bookshop in Somerville to purchase me a copy of Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill. I read the first page and saw the prose was taut enough for me to give it a try. […]
Exquisite Writing.
12-Mar-10I just wrote a review where I contested that Joseph O’Neill’s writing is lyrical, beautiful, exquisite, etc. For contrast, I provide what I consider exquisite writing. This is the beginning of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. Note the languorous conclusions of the sentences. This is all silk and pillows, no doubt, and not all writing should […]
Virginia Brown.
11-Mar-10A really lovely tribute to a lady and a scholar, by her husband. Her story is as remarkable as she was: She had grown up in Lake Providence, Louisiana, a small town in the northeast of the state near the Arkansas border, in what was and still is the poorest county in the United States. […]
The Most Famous Fish in NYC?
10-Mar-10I sold a photo to NPR on Friday – twenty-five bucks. They needed a shot of Buttkiss (I still shudder to see it spelled that way) for their story on the Richmond Hill ichthyological landmark. Human beings get only fifteen minutes, but this fish is into his sixth month of fame. And a piece came […]
Oh My… Stone Shamu???
04-Mar-10Memory cannot really handle just how crazy the American Family Association – a huge organization, by the way, with 200 radio stations and all kinds of clout – really is. You need to be reminded again and again. One of their writers, Bryan Fischer, accused Seaworld of negligence by keeping a killer whale with a […]
Holland.
04-Mar-10There really is quite a bit of interesting stuff going on in Holland (surprisingly enough). The party of Geert Wilders, campaigning against further Muslim immigration to Holland – and, honestly, there is room for a discussion of immigration, especially as the economic reasons for it are now suspect, as capital go to cheap labor now […]