March 2008
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On your left is the official photograph of the 1952 P. S. 217 eighth grade graduating class, contributed by a classmate who now teaches in Brazil. (Click to enlarge). It's quite the time capsule, isn't it — the dated costumes, the old-fashioned hairstyles, along with the clean-cut and dewy enthusiasm of far-away-and-long-ago youth. What has become…
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We’re in Alameda, California, for ten days, visiting the grandchildren and also their parents. The big news here is that the Alameda public schools are in a money crunch. The root cause is Proposition 13, the granddaddy of pernicious tax-limiting amendments (we have one in Colorado, too — it’s paralyzed us). The immediate precipitant of…
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My good friend Professor L—- is an eminent scholar of American literature and an upstanding teacher at the University of C——. A few months ago, Professor L—— told me the following story. I repeat it unvarnished and unadorned — a curious but instructive anecdote from the trenches of learning. Some years ago, on the last…
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Aficionados of this blague will remember that Dr. M. occasionally revisits books that were notorious in the days of his unnaturally elongated adolescence. Here’s a small sample of the novels that Dr. M has reported upon: I the Jury, King Solomon's Mines, The Caine Mutiny, Blackboard Jungle, The Amboy Dukes, Lord of the Flies, Catcher…
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I can't recommend Marion Meade's The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (New York, 2000), which I too hastily snatched off the library shelf. Written at the tabloid height of the Woody-Mia-Soon-yi fracas, it masquerades as a biography but in truth it's nothing more than scandalmongery. Before it gets down in the dirt, however, Unruly…
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Irene Nemirovsky’s spare but luminous novella, Fire in the Blood, is set in an out-of-the-way French village a few years before the start of World War II. Just as the plot is beginning to come to a boil, the author interjects an easy-to-overlook but very telling incident. "A car full of Parisians arrived and stopped…
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At the precinct caucus last month, I was chosen to be a delegate to the county assembly. The assembly is where we Dems nominate candidates for county-wide offices (and do a lot of other business, using procedures that are obscure to veterans and incomprehensible to first-time attendees). Yesterday, we filled the Skyline High School auditorium…
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It's election season once again. I'm thinking of making a run for city council in our progessive western town. Here's my new platform, voters. 1. NO LEAF BLOWERS. Rationale: it's a horrible noisy unecological machine that can easily be replaced with a broom. And everyone knows that single-stroke engines are major polluters. 2. ALL MALL PERFORMERS…
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Away From Her explores the infinitely sorrowful subject of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Fiona Andersson, in her vigorous mid-sixties, has begun to lose her way and to forget names; she stores the frying pan in the refrigerator. She thinks that she’s “beginning to disappear.” Fiona’s plight is worrisome to every human being but it is especially disturbing…
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Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown is a sentimental love story with an unhappy ending. Like most of Allen’s works, it has become a far better work of art with a few years on its back than it seemed on first viewing (1999) — probably because audiences habitually come to the Woodman’s films with the mouth…