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 strange animals [...]
I was pondering my fate, as I tend to do in dentists’ waiting rooms, when I hit on the idea of distracting myself with all the beautiful people in one of those high fashion magazines that smell of bad perfume. I thought the vacuity might be restful. The experience was worse than burnt coffee.
It [...]
Movies and monotheism are strange bedfellows. It takes big-time hypocrisy to make their shotgun marriage work. As for advertising and monotheism, the word hypocrisy doesn’t cover that stretch.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me, except your favorite actors, most gorgeous models and boorish celebs. And as for graven images, well, I guess the models [...]
“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...It’s always good to see journalists pushing the envelope. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer nudged it into rare metaphysical territory November 9 when he interviewed Joel Osteen, the best-selling pastor of Houston’s Lakewood Church, which draws more than 47,000 attendees a week.
“Well, beyond the devil, are there groups, organizations, individuals you feel are part of this group [...]
It’s always the ones we overlook who are changing the world in concert with angels. It’s the ones who want our attention for it we should distrust.
If we want men with fire in the belly who never flip-flop, we’ll get what we deserve, and we’ll deserve it in poverty, ill health and miserable dupedom.
A leader [...]
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, [...]
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