September 2011
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When I was in graduate school (fifty years ago, believe it or not), I enrolled for a course called "Modern American Poetry." In the unthrilling days of yesteryear, "modern" still meant the generation of Eliot and Pound. This particular course, however, was so up-to-the moment that it might have been called "last month's American poetry."…
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My first purchase for the new Kindle was a "set" of fifty novels by Anthony Trollope for $4.95 — or ten cents for each spacious, digressive, leisurely book, many of which I have read in the past as three-volume baggy monsters. Initiating a 21st-century electronic device with classic Victorian novels tickles me. The Kindle fits…
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Here's a sad childhood memory. Just around the corner from us, on Ditmas Avenue, there lived the ugliest man I've ever seen in my entire life. He was a small, always solitary old man. He was not deformed, just plain ugly. His nose and mouth stuck way out, but his chin receded; he had very long…