January 2018
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I am totally in love with a bit of dialogue in Dog Day Afternoon (1975), the great Sidney Lumet social drama/comedy/crime film. Sonny's plan to finance his wife Leon 's sex change operation by robbing a bank has run aground. In exchange for freeing his hostages, Sonny wants a plane to take him to a…
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It wasn't until I reached college that I discovered poetry. My comic-book, super-hero and baseball-infused brain was until then, poetry-wise, an almost complete tabula rasa; I say "almost" because at eight or nine eight years old I had already memorized two great classics of American literature: "Casey at the Bat" and also the poem by…
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Dear Talia, Oliver, Ella, Lola, Luke, Caleb, Asher: This is a picture of my father's grandmother (that is, my great-grandmother and therefore your great-great-great grandmother) whom I can now identify as Menucha Sheindl Perelman (born Rabinovich) who died in 1908 at the age of 75 or thereabouts. She was born in the shtetl of…
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Italian has the ability to swallow English words whole, not even bothering to Italianize them. Here are a few examples drawn from a 2016 novel by Stefano Benni. "Freezer," as in diventa rigido come un peluche lasciato nel freezer." ("It became stiff like a stuffed animal left in the freezer.") "I cornflakes," incorporated as a plural noun.…
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We binge-watched the seven-hour mini-series Godless in three marathon nights. Godless is a Western, or more exactly a fantasia on Western-movie themes and incidents. To the genre-literate, almost every plot element or character will be familiar, but shootouts and jail breaks and horse-rustling and miraculously healing bullet wounds were re-combined in ways that kept our…
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Unlike most sciences, where there are numerous pseudo-Greek or pseudo-Latin coinages, geology offers all sorts picturesque and lovely words that have been in the language for years – and are novel to me. So "graywacke" –a muddy sandstone containing particles of quartz"; "fumarole" — a small vent emitting jets of steam; "sinter" – a crust…
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Dear grandchildren: I once asked my father, your great-grandfather Emanuel Pearlman, where in the Ukraine we originated. He said that he was told that it was a village called (and here he used a very deep guttural initial consonant) Xhosantin-gebernya – an answer that left me not much enlightened. If he knew more — and…