April 2012
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I've now read the first three of the quintet of the much-praised Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn, and that's all I'm going to read. It's been a long time since I've encountered anything so nasty. Is there a word for a place in which every single individual is evil, snobbish, vindictive, petty, and…
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Abkhazian has fifty-eight consonants. By contrast, English, a language which is not consonant-poor, has twenty-three: the ones for which there are the alphabetic letters such as b, d, f, etc. plus sh, ch, dz, ng, the occasional trilled r, and the two sounds that are indicated by th (voiced in 'soothe' and unvoiced in 'sooth').…
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I imagine that the "pitch" went something like this: "Ok, we have the star, Dana Carvey, who's hot right now. He's a funny man. He's going to play a detective who watches The Maltese Falcon on the tv and thinks he's Humphrey Bogart. And there's a coin that's worth seven million dollars and a bunch…
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I prefer to hear rather than to see grand opera. The cd and the radio are my preferred media. Stay at home, sit in a comfortable chair, listen carefully, be ravished. When you go to the opera, you re-discover that the plot is all silliness, the characters incomprehensible, and the intermissions interminable. Nevertheless, there I…
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In 1904, at the age of 20, my grandmother Sonia Chafetz Uzilewski (later Green) disembarked at Ellis Island. Because of her age, and because she lived within an immigrant community, she never acquired much English, and as a result my conversations with her were strictly utilitarian. I was curious about the old country (White Russia,…
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It was a long, luxurious summer, with gardens and apple cider and swimming and berry-picking and walks in the woods and cousins and all sorts of games. All much enjoyed by Lola, who is now approaching two and a half years old. "So, Lola, what do your remember about last summer in Vermont?" Lola, after…
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Somewhere in the Night is an early Joseph Mankiewicz film noir with amnesia at its center. George Taylor, an injured ex-Marine played monochromatically by John Hodiak, returns from the South Pacific not knowing who he is are what he was – except that he has a clue that he was on the shady side of…
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I'm sure that I once before read a book called The Art of Fielding, perhaps in the 1960s, but it wasn't a baseball novel; it was a old-fashioned critical monograph about Henry Fielding, the author of Shamela, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, Amelia, and Jonathan Wild. (For what it's worth, Chad Harbach, who contributed this year's…