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 [...]
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 [...]
(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 gray region between sexism and misogyny is a gloaming filled with turned around street signs and delusions. I ought to know because I’ve been wallowing in it. I wrote in this space that Senator Hillary Clinton was marching like the Energizer Bunny off a cliff. I faulted her for playing the race card. I [...]
Read More...Is that your start scuffed in your coat? I asked my wife the other day. I meant, of course, to ask if that was her scarf stuffed in her coat. It was a humble example of a spoonerism. I love spoonerisms. I think if we declared one day a week Spoonerism Day and observed [...]
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...(This is the transcript of Hot Copy No. 43, one of my regular pod casts for The Student Operated Press)
There’s a crucial difference between balanced reporting and insightful reporting. You can listen to this difference by tuning into the Yes Network and listening to color commentator David Cone, the famously versatile former pitcher who once [...]
(Meditations on Rising and Falling, Philip Pardi, The University of Wisconsin Press, 87 pp, 2008, $14.95)
A good book of poems is not just a collection of good poems. Conceptualizing a book of poems is like conceptualizing a complex poem times ten. There are ways to play it safe: safe poems, safe structure. You employ what [...]
Sexism, racism, agism, smoothies, bumblers, swift-boaters, dreamers—all flavors in the great American apple pie. As we learn to avoid trans fats so we learn, ever so slowly, to wean ourselves from misogyny, racism, agism and all those other nasties.
The late Democratic primary had plenty of misogyny and racism to go around. It arose among the [...]