Thoughts on literature, well, anything people write
I am reading the new biography ‘All Governments Lie’: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone by Myra MacPherson. Mr. Stone worked for a few years at the famous experimental New York newspaper P.M. Reading again about the trendsetting daily of the late 1940s and early 1950s was coincident given the news […]
Which self is awed, which one is angry, which is embarrassed, which is confused by some ol’ story that ran in the newspaper days ago? My colleague the columnist Jay Grelen in Little Rock wrote Sunday of his long pursuit of an interview with novelist Harper Lee. He didn’t write it for publication just then; […]
Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock Not to be outdone, we in the Ozarks have a playwright equal to the latest Irish sensation Martin McDonagh. Salvatore O’Mally of Farmington, Ark., has an even more larcenous soul than McDonagh. It’s a wonder he isn’t as well-known. McDonagh got an eight-page profile in the March 6, 2006, New […]
Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock Now, there’s any number of articles about one of my heroes, Art Buchwald. Here is one, written by a friend, just a couple of weeks ago. Mr. Buchwald is dying, by choice. He’s well past 80, and his body is shutting down, he knows it and is refusing treatment. The […]
Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. This novel — ingested via a CD set with not one but three narrators portraying the four principal roles — from just last year is a good read. Besides wondering how the characters are getting along now, a week after I finished their […]
Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock Today’s title is A Man Without a Country, by Kurt Vonnegut, 2005, Seven Stories Press. I got through this volume’s 146 pages in only a part of an evening. I read the sections willy-nilly, and I didn’t care (quite unlike my habit). It didn’t matter, although the essays and sketches […]