Bunnies from a black silk tophat! Doves looping through swirls of chiffon! Abracadabra is our word for magic. But there is an even lovelier etymology floating through the cultural landscape: abracadabra as a softening of ebra kedabra, meaning to speak something into existence. Which is quite a trick. Words have always made things […]
Who could resist a book called Monk on the Run? With chapters titled “Monk on the Lam” and “Monk in the Slam”? The Buddhists were not best pleased to learn that the eager student who had kept their discipline for five years came to hide from the feds. As character witnesses in his […]
“I will be your tour guide through hell,” Joe West likes to promise. Joe Schwartz is his real name, and he works at the St. Louis Public Library, has for nineteen years, started as a custodian after a series of jobs filled with sweat, risk, and male camaraderie. Hell is not […]
Of all Joan Didion’s brilliant lines, one has been co-opted to open hundreds of essays by lesser writers—and here we go again: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” We do tell ourselves stories in order to live. And we live in conflict. Stories only work when there is conflict—that is the […]
I never knew there was a real Stanley Kowalski. I never needed there to be a real Stanley Kowalski. Marlon Brando’s primal yell in Streetcar Named Desire—“STEL-LA!!!”—epitomized far too many men already. Home from the latest war, these men are no longer sure they are men. They have been shot up, cut up, […]
Not even five feet tall, Dorothy Parker had a whispery finishing-school voice, walked in a cloud of perfume, and said “fuck” a lot. Also other four-letter words, delivered deadpan. Her wit flashed you, left you stunned and tickled. But the humor came out of tragedy, insecurity, a sharp appraisal of human nature, and […]
How I yearned to be a fiction writer. Not to write fiction, mind you. Not to invent plots or breathe life into characters. I much preferred digging around in the real world. No, what I wanted was for a literary editor to take me to lunch. In New York. Someplace with white tablecloths. In […]
The guys I knew in journalism worshipped Hunter S. Thompson. Literally worshipped, as though he were a mythic god and gonzo a rite of passage. They imitated his stunts, dreamed up pranks that would make him proud. One even took “Thomas Hunter” as his pseudonym. Me, I just loved Nellie Bly. Elizabeth […]
In 2001, Professor Sklodowska and I taught a Focus course on Cuba which included a spring study trip to the island. Dean Delores Kennedy and others accompanied us, as well as administrators and colleagues. Leonardo Padura’s Adiós Hemingway (originally published 2001) was part of the curriculum. One day, out of the blue, I […]
Joan Didion’s nonfiction book Miami (1987) is a reminder of how good writing captures the problems of its time and—in time—proves them to be continuously-working parts in the bigger movement of history. Miami is more often referred to as reportage than New Journalism, but the “I” of Didion is always there, even when […]
