January 2008
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As is our custom, we journeyed from New York to Washington (and back) on the so-called "Chinese bus." It's a bargain: round-trip between Chinatown here and Chinatown there for just $35. It's a non-standard, non-greyhoundish, no frills experience. It's also shoestring capitalism in the raw. When a potential passenger arrives at the East Broadway departure…
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Today it was my assignment to pick up the five-year-old granddaughter at the local Montessori school. We walked home together. It’s a ten minute walk but it took us more than forty minutes. Here’s why. There was a patch of frozen snow on the ground. Ella pretended to skate back and forth on it for…
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Here the all but preternatural patience of metablogian aficionados is solicited as Dr Metablog quotes directly from an ancient (April, ’07) posting on sex and the horsedrawn vehicle — the R-rated entirety of which can be found here: "Regular readers of this blague are well aware that I have repeatedly indulged my bemusement with the…
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Michael Hollingsworth writes: "Dear Dr. M.: you're directly on target when you claim that Woody Allen and Philip Roth are the same person, but you've unaccountably omitted to mention the most pressing evidence.The year: 1972. Philip Roth published The Breast, a fantasy about a writer transformed into one. Woody Allen released Everything You Always Wanted…
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Today, or tomorrow at the latest, the blague Dr. Metablog will have been visited for the twenty-thousandth time. A milestone — twenty thousand readers. Well, perhaps not exactly readers. It would be more accurate to say twenty-thousand page viewers. Twenty-thousand page views is considerably fewer than twenty-thousand readers. Actually, many of those page-viewers aren’t readers…
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Today we paid a call on the New Museum of Contemporary Art. It’s an uncompromising, vibrant building, all the more grand for being plunked down in the rusty old Bowery. The space is wonderful. But the stuff on exhibition is, in my less than humble opinion, ludicrous. A mattress covered with buttons. A cage made…
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Michael Hollingsworth, associate professor of American Literature at Texas A & M University, writes this: "Dr Metablog: you claim that Woody Allen and Philip Roth are doppelgangers. I've got to tell you something you might not want to hear: you're way behind the curve on this one. It's been well known in literary circles for…
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We’re in Manhattan (New York, not Kansas) where I’m suffering from two kinds of sticker shock: regular and newyorkish. Regular: at DIA, I treated myself to a cylinder of Life Savers: $1.35. Life Savers, as everyone knows, were invented by Hart Crane’s father and are still manufactured to the formula that has made them a…