February 6, 2017
Citizenship (Part One)
I’m writing this post on Super Bowl Sunday, a semi-holiday (or day of observance, literally) that’s wholly American. And I’m thinking about what it means to be an American in […]
December 29, 2016
The Great Work Begins
Late in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika, Belize tells Louis, “You come with me to room 1013 over at the hospital, I’ll show you America. Terminal, crazy […]
January 1, 2014
Out with the Auld
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Of course not, says experience, and conscience, and (answering his own question) Robert Burns. So we raise our cups o’ […]
November 18, 2013
Of Blogs and Bobbleheads
About ten years ago, a friend offered to buy me a custom-made bobblehead doll for my birthday. The question, then: Who did I want? Whitman seemed too obvious (I have […]
July 4, 2010
Ain’t That America
Today marks the 155th anniversary of the publication of Leaves of Grass. The 36-year-old Whitman had hoped to write a “new American Bible,” a work that you, the reader, might […]
June 10, 2010
The Sixth Memo
I’ve glanced in the direction of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium from time to time during my year-plus of writing these posts, but I’ve never, until now, […]
June 1, 2009
Location, Location, Location
Nabokov wrote The Real Life of Sebastian Knight under unusual circumstances. In a 1941 letter to Edmund Wilson (penned long before their famous feud), he tells his new friend, “I […]