December 2007
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Diligent readers of this blague will recall that last January, I made a series of daring forecasts about the year 2007. It’s now time to review my projections and evaluate my record. I’m proud to say that a panel of independent experts has confirmed that I hit the jackpot. I scored an 8 out of…
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We were in the car heading toward Palo Alto when I brought up the old bromide that in the English language, a person drives on a parkway and parks on a driveway. Immediately, my fellow-passengers began to list other roadways that contained the element ”way.” Highway, superhighway, freeway (and its opposite, tollway) came immediately to…
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In 1895, my grandparents wisely left the abysmal, backward Ukraine and struck out for the new world. Nine years later, my father was born in a cold-water flat in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The date of his birth: December 22, 1904, exactly at the winter solstice. "And they called his name, Emanuel, God with…
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Our own dreams are fascinating to ourselves but not particularly interesting to others (exceptions to the general rule are the dreams recounted and expounded in Freud’s Interpretation). I know that I presume upon my readers to record the following nightmare. I do so only because it’s such a shocking fantasia. I was in a jewelry…
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Yesterday I considered the near-incest situations of Philip Roth and Woody Allen. In Roth’s My Life as a Man, Roth’s shadow Nathan Zuckerman marries Lydia Kettering and when she commits suicide he takes up with Monica, who is Lydia’s sixteen-year-old daughter by a previous marriage. When Lydia turns twenty-one, Zucerkman proposes marriage but she, wiser…
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A few days ago, noting that their careers and obsessions converge in ways that seem uncanny, I suggested that Philip Roth and Woody Allen were not just doppelgangers, but might in fact be one and the same person. I've just now read Roth's 1970 novel My Life as a Man, which must be the most…
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Shakespeare’s audiences were notoriously raucous. Folks entered and left during performances, commented loudly on the action and the actors, and ate oranges and hazelnuts during performances. (When the Rose Theater was excavated in 1994, its floor was found to be paved with crushed hazelnut litter.) The Rose, the Globe, and the Fortune were noisy, busy,…
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At first I found Vernon God Little to be rough going. The narrative voice — a popcultch-saturated south Texas adolescent idiom — took some getting used to. The novel is a post-mass-murder burlesque, hilarious in spots, but not even remotely credible. Vernon God Little won the Man Booker Prize in 2003, but I wonder whether…
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Last week I reported that in 1929 William Empson was expelled and expunged from Cambridge University for owning a condom, a circumstance that I judged to be an scandalous instance of ancient prudery. But in thanks to one of those fascinating moments of cultural convergence, I've just re-read, after almost fifty years, Philip Roth's Goodbye,…
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I’ve now penetrated halfway into the Philip Roth corpus, reading not chronologically but as the novels become available in our local public library. At this moment I’ve interrupted my progress to enjoy DBC Pierre’s Booker Prize novel Vernon God Little, a virgin copy of which I uncovered in a basement storage box. Here’s my interim…