March 2009
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We've left the old place for a slick new condo. It was a good ol' house. A 1912 arts and crafts bungalow, probably built right out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog. When we arrived, in 1973, she had been much abused: some of her fir woodwork painted, some removed; the stained-glass window and the original…
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Louis Agassiz was, Darwin aside, the nineteenth century's most acclaimed naturalist. He was the first to speculate about the ice ages and the first to suggest that mastodons and other giant quadrupeds had become extinct as a consequence of the deep freeze in Asia and America. Agassiz was much celebrated in his lifetime, and at…
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In The Merchant of Venice, as it appears in one up-to-date modern edition, Portia's husband-to-be Bassanio is attended by a pair of friends named Solanio and Salerio. Yet In another equally authoritative edition of the play, the friends are named Solanio and Salerino — and moreover, in this edition, a third and apparently separate character named…
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In the middle of The Merchant of Venice, right out of the blue, without warning, the audience is suddenly told that Launcelot the clown has gotten a "Negro" pregnant. Who is this 'Negro'? Why haven't we heard of her before? Why does Shakespeare introduce her into his play? And why, having invented her, does he precipitously drop her? A…
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In the course of the Great Downsizing, a long-buried letter emerged from the "archives." It's from my long-gone father, and was written in December of 1974 on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. A most fortuitous discovery — inasmuch as I am now exactly the age that Pop was on the day that he wrote to…
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"I was born in 1920 in Bayonne. I had four older sisters. When I was eleven, my mother died and my father disappeared. I was taken in by my sister Jennie and her husband Jack. She was eighteen, he was nineteen. They raised me. I graduated from Bayonne High School in 1938. For years I worked for an insurance company in New…