Some people become ghosts before their time. They’re spoken about but avoided like sharp-edged furniture or a malodorous back alley. They’re painted into problematical corners, as if somehow they’re a problem which everyone knows but can’t name. It’s the kind of thing that happens when a wife starts calling a well read husband The Professor [...]
Read More...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...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.
Read More...Now that our planet, a betrayed beloved, is strongly suggesting to us that unremitting consumerism may just dig us a hole to hell, we might learn a new way of living from the resourcefulness of children. Have you noticed how children build whole worlds with stick and stones, how they improvise, making magic circles, giving [...]
Read More...“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought [...]
Read More...I’ve been opening the wrong doors lately—well, maybe it’s nothing new—but what is new is that I expect to walk into rooms I don’t live in anymore. I expect them to be just as they were when I lived in them. I don’t think I expect myself to be just as I was, no, just [...]
Read More...I’ve always thought of snobs as narrow of foot and thin of lip, given to cutlery stares and cold shoulders, none of which describes this broad-footed fellow. But now in my old age and especially when walking around Woodstock, New York, that rainbow-hued, pinwheel-kinetic redoubt of the New Age, I repent of ugly snobbery, because [...]
Read More...One of the more exquisite aspects of writing poetry is that it is always leading the poet to pretty passes. I’m fond of pretty passes, having been born into one. But the triangle into which I was born is a matter for another day. My pretty pass du jour leads me to consider the word [...]
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