The Center for Emerging Media has posted my call to the elderly to become citizen journalists across the nation. It’s called Let the Elderly Never Sound Retreat, and it lays out a strategy for using the Internet to do a job the news industry is less and less committed to doing. Marc Steiner, director of [...]
Read More...Those of you who ordered Far From Algiers from Kent State University Press in advance of last Friday’s publication date have received notice that it’s “on the truck.” Thank you for this vote of confidence. I hope you will be rewarded. If you contact me, I will be happy to inscribe a bookplate for you.
I [...]
(Transcript of Hot Copy No. 44, a podcast for The Student Operated Press).
There is nothing like reading something you have written aloud for finding and correcting its infelicities. An article, maybe just a headline, may be perfectly grammatical and yet awkward. If it sounds smooth it will read well. But what is just as [...]
There are certain days when things don’t hold their shape. This is not just a middle-age weight problem or distortion through a tear drop. It can happen in bright sunlight. People go convex and concave. Buildings seem to play with hula hoops. Sentences play hooky on their periods. Things are not exactly where they ought [...]
Read More...The soldiers we see in Iraq, looking more and more like cyborgs with their night vision headgear, and the soldiers who won the great tank battles of Desert Storm because of their night vision capability, could not have carried out their missions were it not for a son of Iraq named Abu Ali Hasan al [...]
Read More...Far From Algiers is my first book of poems. It won the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Prize and will be published by Kent State University Press later this summer. It may be ordered now. There will also be an audio version.
Read More... If we are the world, as we say we are, how is it possible to have a foreign face in America?
Not all immigrants come by this question the hard way. If you come
from Northern Europe or Slavic Europe, you may grasp the question in your head but not your gut, because the chances are [...]
New York’s Hudson Valley and the nearby Berkshires and Taconics are alive with art galleries. When people buy second homes in these
scenic treasuries they look to local galleries to provide them mementos of their new environment. They’re missing a huge bet.
If I were a fledgling or even a seasoned collector of contemporary and recent [...]
Sometimes I think the all news all day formula is traumatizing society. The news—if you can call that weird concoction of anchor bonhomie and drivel news—is surpassingly negative, and in the interest of ratings the media rarely lose an opportunity to exaggerate the negative side of the news. News or what passes for it [...]
Read More...Have you ever wondered long after a party about that certain somebody you didn’t meet but can’t forget? This is the subject of Gatecrasher, my short story in the June issue of The Country and Abroad. The beautiful woman whose image accompanies the story is my mother, the artist Juanita Guccione.
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