The news industry is worrying itself from its 19th Century decrepitude to the ether, but it needs to redefine the concept of news itself. What we read in our newspapers and watch on television is antiquarian. In some ways magazines, with their broader perspectives, are ahead of the curve.
What the news needs more than anything [...]
When you search the web for Sinbad you’re likely to find David Adkins, the comedian, before you find that wealthy young sailor of Basra whose adventures are immortalized in The Thousand and One Nights.
When you search on Odysseus you find Homer’s mythological sailor immediately. We are, after all, Eurocentric, and worldwide accessibility to the web [...]
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...Noah Eli Gordon in an end paper in the Spring issue of Rain Taxi says he recently began to read page twenty-six of every book he owns. The more I thought about this quixotic adventure the more it enchanted me. As I compared it to the evening news, it seemed to me infinitely more [...]
Read More... I recently took part in a deeply rewarding discussion of late-life writing. Sponsored by Passager journal and press, housed at Baltimore University, the panel at Rehoboth, Delaware, explored not only the challenges facing elderly writers but the elderly’s special strengths.
We were all writers on the panel, Shirley Brewer and I were guests, and Passager’s [...]
Paintings come to mean different things in different times.
Recently the ArtDaily Newsletter wrote about The Courtauld Gallery’s collection of Impressionist masterpieces. The report featured an
image of Pierre Auguste Renoir’s La Loge (The Theater Box), an 1874 oil painting.
The Impressionists were celebrated for their modernity, their study of society. What impresses me, studying an [...]
Everything is an authorized version of something else. Everything and everyone has a back story. It’s because of this that we might usefully give more thought to championship, not in the sense of winners but in the sense of championing someone else.
We could ask ourselves why certain artists (I use the term here to [...]
Two of my short stories, Charm City and Yo Sheherazade,
made it to final rounds of judging in New Millennium
Writings competitions in the past year. Charm City is
about a high-flying investment banker who takes a walk
on the dark side in Baltimore one day and then loses
his wife, his daughter and his job when he makes a [...]
What is all this blogblatt about too many writers? What
silliness. Did the Victorians worry about teaching everyone
to draw? Do we worry about too many baseball players, too many pretty girls, too many movies?
Who are these self-appointed gatekeepers who spout this nonsense? If you write a good poem and it makes your day or somebody [...]