Goodness, I feel like I have houseguests whom I maybe should have expected were going to come over, but for whatever reason did not. What I mean is: this Web site, my personal site, usually gets about one or two visitors a day, according to Google Analytics. This is somewhat by design: as you can [...]
Do you know the book Bagels for Benny (by Aubrey Davis, illustrated by Dušan Petričič, Kids Can Press, 2003)? It’s really great. Benny helps out in his grandfather’s bakery; the grandfather tells Benny that his customers shouldn’t really thank him for his bagels, but instead should thank God, since God made the wheat from which [...]
1) From last week’s New Yorker, from David Remnick’s lead Talk of the Town essay (“A Man, a Plan,” on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu): Psychobiography in politics is ordinarily a mug’s game. 2) Which sent me to Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter?, which is where I remember first encountering the phrase; he mentions it [...]
(Week-of-unrelated-quotes catch-up post, four of five.) From The Finkler Question, p. 177 in the Bloomsbury paperback: Julian Treslove is the protagonist, who, at this point in the novel, although not born Jewish, feels like perhaps he is Jewish; Finkler and Libor are two old friends, both born Jewish, both men Jewish in very different ways [...]
(Week-of-unrelated-quotes catch-up post, two of five.) Walking up the stairs to my office at my new job the other day, I walked past two boys talking; I couldn’t say for sure how old they were (nine, maybe ten?—I’ll understand these nuances in 2018; in the meantime, I know very well the differences between, say, 21 [...]
From Wonder Boys, p. 275 of the paperback (the movie tie-in edition, with Michael Douglas on the cover): a paragraph that ends with what I think is a great sentence, but one that’s hard to extract from what comes right before it—which, in turn, is somewhat impenetrable out of context. Here’s the opening: I looked [...]
From an era when not only did a writer have a reasonable shot at making money off a short story—if he or she really wanted to make the big bucks, he adapted it for the stage: the epigraph to the short story “The Day of Atonement,” by Sampson Raphaelson: So Sound and Dramatic Is this [...]
I can remember driving with my late father through western Pennsylvania. He was struck by the amount of land without a human figure in it. So much space! After a long silence, in a traveler’s trance resembling the chessboard trance, he said, ‘Ah, how many Jews might have been settled here! Room enough for everybody.’ [...]
(Catch-up post, five of five.) If this page is accurate, it’s incredibly difficult to change your name if you’re not going through the paperwork of getting married or getting divorced (and even then it’s incredibly difficult—and probably always has been, although I think it’s now even more difficult since the terrorist attacks seven years ago). [...]
Emily’s essay “Eli Miller’s Seltzer Delivery Service,” which is in the Brooklyn Was Mine anthology, being not just about our favorite, and greatly missed, borough, but also about Yiddishkeit—and a little bit about our shared obsessiveness with doing what we can to make our home more green—has also been published at Nextbook.