“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
Do we all grieve for people we have never met, whose deaths knock us down because of what they have come to represent to us and others? Two or three million Frenchmen and women are said to have come out for Victor Hugo’s funeral procession in Paris in May of 1885. Untold numbers lined the tracks to pay respect to Lincoln’s and FDR’s and Robert Kennedy’s bodies as they […]
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Pay too much attention to the world and it will make you frantic, then ridiculous, then deranged. At Story Time at work a little boy told the other babies that penguins make long bleats like goats. Then he brought his two hands together and flickered out his little fingers like flippers and ululated and we all joined in, 22 of us racketing and caterwauling like no penguin ever on […]
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I have not read his early books – Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint, etc. I know him from his astonishing later period, roughly from 1997 to 2007, eleven years of work he completed from his mid-60’s to mid-70’s. – I Married a Communist , The Human Stain , The Plot Against America and Exit Ghost and the novel that changed how I thought of contemporary American literature, American Pastoral .* Before American Pastoral (1997), I wondered if the realist/naturalist strain of American writing had exhausted […]
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I have been writing about Trump and his death cult Republicans since December of 2015, thousands and thousands of words, 38 Posts total. I have been trying to figure him out, this mess we are in, what comes next. He is so deep in my head that when I wake up, I check the Times just to see if _the_ catastrophe has arrived. This past week opened new pathways in […]
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