November 2011
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Charlie Dressen: "You know something? I never read a book in my whole life… I can read newspapers and magazines. But I never read a book. You think I should?" Jean Harlow (on her birthday): "Don't get me a book. I already got a book." Anatole Broyard: "If it hadn't been for books, we'd have…
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I reached my peak with numbers when I was a child at P. S. 217 (under the tutelage of Mrs. McNulty). Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division — that's my area of expertise. Geometry, algebra, trig — way too abstract for my pedestrian brain. Calculus and up — not the least chance. Arithmetic yes, mathematics no. Sometimes…
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The word to watch in a most riveting speech in Measure for Measure is "paradise." Young Claudio. whose head is scheduled to be lopped off tomorrow morning, is the speaker. He panics — and why shouldn't he? After all, his only slip is that he has impregnated his ladylove Juliet. A venial sin, yet in newly-puritanical Vienna, the…
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Let us understand what Lola (the exemplary two-year-old granddaughter) meant when she cryptically observed, "Nay, no ba." Nay –perhaps better spelled neigh — means horse or horses. "Ba" are of course sheep. Lola watched them last summer when the two grazing animals shared the same Vermont pasture. But when her father took her to a…
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A "replacement child," narrowly defined, is a person who is intentionally conceived because an older sibling has recently died. Such substitutes must endure the lifetime burden of competing with a lost and often idealized child. Because it is almost impossible for such persons to please their parents, they easily become confused and frustrated, and in worst-case scenarios, pathological. One…