September 2006
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I once read the last 200 pages of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure in a single hour. This extraordinary feat occurred in, I think, 1959 or 1960. As a general rule, I’m not a speedy reader — just about average, in fact. But for one splendid hour, I was able to read at four or five…
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I was taught, and I have no reason not to believe, that there are three forms of matter. There are solids, there are liquids, and there are gases. But nowadays I’m expected to believe that there are at least two other forms of matter. No matter how I frazzle my brain trying to imagine what…
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I was not a committed moviegoer as a youth — punchball, basketball, softball, stickball in the street all having more appeal. But often enough, on a Saturday, especially when the weather was bad, there were double-feature matinees at the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue. =Admission for children was fourteen cents when I first started…
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[January 17, 2012. There are at this moment three pages of comments appended to this entry, which I wrote almost six years ago. The comments are most interesting and revealing. Don't miss 'em — Vivian]. In The Accidental Tourist (New York [Knopf], 1991), Anne Tyler describes a malady that, as far as I know had…
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Diligent readers of this blague (a “fit audience though few,” as John Milton said in a slightly different context) will remember that I’ve reported on the language, the culture and the sexual politics of P. S. 217 and its neighborhood. Newsflash!! It now appears that P. S. 217 contributed to the worldview of the century’s…
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Most people either don't understand academic tenure or regard it as a flagrant scam — nothing more than a lifetime cushy job burdened with little work and rewarded with long summers vacations. Popular wisdom is entirely incorrect. Tenure is a good deal for those who achieve it and it's a bargain for America. The…
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Toward the end of July, while I was in Lyme, New Hampshire celebrating a friend's third marriage, I bit into a fancy cracker that was topped with a fragment of sun-dried tomato. With my tongue I felt what I assumed to be small stone. I spit it into my hand and after a few disorienting…
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More outrageous even than "mission accomplished" is the absurd claim that, during 2006, our very own president, George W. Bush, has read fifty-three books. It's a fool's game to try to re-invent the class dunce as an intellectual, but they're trying. There's some incriminating videotape floating around the "internets" in which POTUS, heretofore known to…
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On the second Monday of September,1956, I found my way to Rockefeller Hall and my very first college class. It was a laboratory section of Chemistry 105. There were more than a thousand people enrolled in the course. We had all taken a mathematics aptitude test, and I had been placed in an advanced section…
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In my Vermont garden, I grow a number of different varieties of German (also called bearded) irises. One variety — a bicolor I inherited a decade ago from my sister– had died. I put a spade into the ground to see if I could discover the source of the problem, and I found that the…