Back in 2021 I wrote a piece about First Lieutenant Amy Nickles, an American army nurse from Georgia who was awarded the Bronze Star in World War Two and saw as much or more of the European Theater as famed writer Ernie Pyle. I became interested in her because I could find […]
Yesterday I felt a great disturbance in the metro area, as if a million books had cried out at not being read. Then I remembered it was the afternoon of the preview for the annual Greater St. Louis Book Fair, now in its 74th year, billed as the Midwest’s largest charity […]
The passing of the poet, translator, editor, and literary force Jerome Rothenberg on April 21, 2024, at age 92 merits a scholarly news obituary that probes his transformative contributions to world literature. This is not that. These are the notes of a rabid fan, virtual mentee, long-distance collaborator, and sad mourner […]
The 2022 documentary Umberto Eco: A Library of the World is more than a tour of the writer’s personal library of more than 30,000 books (Eco had lost count), which once got him evicted from a residence because the city engineer was afraid it would collapse the building. “This library has a […]
On a website since removed from public view, Art Garfunkel mapped with approximate dates the path he walked from his apartment on the Upper East side of Manhattan to Oregon, dating his walk across parts of Pennsylvania as April 1984. That means the following incident would have transpired in April 1984, […]
If you are old enough to have seen Pulp Fiction in a theater when it came out, brace yourself: this is the film’s 30th anniversary. We are as removed from its 1994 release as we were in 1994 to the 1964 release of A Hard Day’s Night, starring four young guys from […]
Just one line in a one-paragraph writeup in The New Yorker, but it stopped me for ten minutes. “For the past decade, her sole subject has been a maple tree that’s growing outside her studio window.” Seriously? How does any artist focus that calmly, and that narrowly, for that long? Who is Sylvia […]
Every so often the forces of new scientific findings and opinion columns align to produce a certain sense of dread and unease. In this case, that dread and that unease are acute if you believe in the power and pleasure of a good cup of coffee. Yes, there are myriad other […]
Hours of my life have been wasted dithering over which compound phrases should be hyphenated, which separate, which mushed together. When Angus Stevenson, an editor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, braved scandal by yanking the hyphens out of 16,000 words, I yelled “Woohoo” at my desk. The act honored aesthetics (hyphens annoy […]
Steve Martin is known for multiple careers: standup comedian, musician, movie actor, art collector, playwright, and author. I was first a dedicated fan of his comedy albums in the Seventies—Let’s Get Small, A Wild and Crazy Guy, and Comedy is Not Pretty!—and deep-down still think of them as his best work. (No: his […]
