October 2006
-
Here are some career paths that it's just as well I didn't tread. 1. Taxi driver in a large city (especially a city that's not on a grid, such as Boston or London. Even the DC-diagonals drive me nuts). I've earlier written about my incapacitating directional disability, but I neglected to mention that I…
-
I liked the film Wonder Boys (2000) so very much that I set out to read all of Michael Chabon's writing. Here's my interim report. I couldn't finish The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (William Morrow, 1988). The book is reported to have sold well and it has been widely praised, but, I'm sorry, I thought it…
-
It's the scandal of the month that Republican Representative Mark Foley solicited sex from adolescent male congressional pages in the same years that he headed the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children and made his reputation for his work on legislation targeting sexual predators. Foley has been universally condemned for his "hypocrisy," as well…
-
I wish I had pleasant dreams but I only have nightmares. Here's one of them. Beginning with early adolescence and continuing to this day, I've had a recurring dream in which I've murdered someone–I don't know whom. The victim is always an unidentifiable male, and his death is always violent. Ordinarily, I beat him to…
-
Our local newspaper, the Boulder Daily Camera, has announced a new policy. No longer will obituaries be considered news. They've been turned over to the classifieds and will be written by friends or relatives of the deceased and placed by funeral homes. Bottom line: deaths are now an opportunity for revenue enhancement. I'd…
-
Here are two excellent poems, of different eras and origins, that are at heart surprisingly similar. The first, "Politics," written in the pre-World War 30s, is by W. B. Yeats. How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics? Yet here's a traveled man that…
-
It was an entirely different world — East 9th Street in the old days. Sometimes it seems so long gone that I find it hard to believe it even though I was there: the last horse-drawn vegetable trucks and milk-wagons in America, an "old-clothes man" shouting his cry in the street, an itinerant knife-sharpener with…
-
Every American should read Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (Riverhead, 2003) — but for its political relevance, not its literary achievement. The novel is set in Afghanistan, which is one of the few countries where recent American foreign policy hasn't been entirely incompetent and disgraceful, so to read it feels reassuring and even patriotic. Inasmuch…
-
In Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son (1848), which I've just re-read, Dombey's treasured son Paul dies when his older sister, Florence, is about six years old. Dombey has never liked his daughter Florence (he seems to blame her for being a girl) and likes her less after he loses Paul. Dombey could transfer his affection…
-
Yesterday the Yankees were drubbed, absolutely demolished, by the Detroit Tigers. Sent home packing. Their loss joyed my vindictive, Yankee-hating heart. When I was a boy hanging out at the P. S. 217 schoolyard and learning about life, there was no question but that the pin-striped Yankees were privileged bland tea-sipping Republicans, while the…