Thoughts on literature, well, anything people write
Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock Can a fortnight’s worth of writer topics fit together, and should they? Why, it depends on the size of your tent. Preferrers of small tents closely define their parameters. A writer must have New York-based publications to his credit. A journalist must be a full-time employee of a news factory. […]
The New Republic (subscription-only) reports that humorist, memoirist, monologist David Sedaris embellishes. A number of otherwise sensible commentators, like Slate’s Jack Shafer, jump on the fellow. Their point: If you laugh, it’s not journalism. If it has a coherent beginning, middle and end, it’s too good to be true. [Casablanca: Captain Renault: “I’m shocked, shocked […]
DATELINE MIRTHOLOGY, Monday July 2, 2007, hypothetically — The Arkansas State Police arrested the executive editors, managing editors and editorial page editors of two prominent newspapers at 11 this morning, no one being in their offices before that. At 12:01 a.m. Sunday, the measure forbidding the spelling of the possessive of Arkansas as “Arkan—‘” became […]
What kind of reader are you? I like sentences so I tend to read word for word, have to force myself to skim. My Beloved looks for content. In print, she refuses to allow cleverness or grace to detour her, though she appreciates good lines in drama, as well as deep thoughts. Who reads, now? […]
A few days ago, the president made a joke at his own expense by referring to his, the “Republic Party.” He was a guest at a gathering of congressional Democrats. Days earlier, the president made reference to the “Democrat Party.” He was being inarticulate. That in large part is what got him elected to the […]
Fishing around for a headline to this, I remembered the above. It’s the outcue for the audio column on NPR’s Morning Edition that the late poet John Ciardi used to do in the early to mid-1980s. He considered origins, histories and roots of words in them. Posthumously, in 1987, Harper published a book of his, […]