February 2012
1 post
The Literary Strife
Novelist Jennifer Haigh is one of my best friends, but that’s not going to stop me from publicly kicking her ass in a game of literary trivia.
What is going to stop me is the fact that she knows a lot more about literature than I do.
Jennifer got me involved with the Boston Book Festival as Debbie Porter was launching it in 2009. It’s been a runaway success, growing in size, scope,...
October 2011
1 post
The Mourners and Steve Jobs
Were any of us expecting the outpouring of sentiment after Steve Jobs died? He was a billionaire CEO (not a beloved class, generally), he engaged in little to no philanthropy, and he had a serious temper.
And yet in the wake of his death people around the world spontaneously set up memorials, left notes at Apple stores, and mourned his loss with great sincerity. With the possible exception of...
September 2011
1 post
The Boys of Late Summer
I love my adopted home of Boston with all my heart, but the winters here profoundly suck. Yes, the first snowfall is gorgeous, but then they get old pretty quickly. And the skies are gray, the driving treacherous and parking impossible, and on its worst midwinter days the city looks like something out of The Road.
Herman Melville, another transplant to New England, wrote bout “growing grim...
August 2011
1 post
On Becoming a Regular
If you’re raised by industrious Midwestern near-teetotalers as I was, you don’t aspire to become a regular at a bar. And reading a lot of Bukowski later in life solidified my notion that people who get to know bartenders’ names are on their way to Skid Row.
But a few years ago Tony Maws opened up Craigie on Main, right on my walk home from MIT. I’d eaten at the Craigie...
July 2011
2 posts
In Memoriam: Cy Twombly
A few years ago I went to MoMA and headed, as I always do, for the design galleries on the 3rd floor. As I passed through the atrium, though, I got stopped in my tracks by a painting. It was Cy Twombly’s “Summer,” part of his Four Seasons series (which is owned by MoMA):
I have no formal art education, so didn’t know that I was looking at a work by one of America’s...
June 2011
2 posts
Happiness Doesn't Hit
I don’t mean to pick a fight with Florence + The Machine and I love the song, but I don’t agree that happiness hits you like a train on the track. It’s way sneakier than that. It doesn’t have a timetable or announce its approach, and it doesn’t follow set pathways. We go looking for it on vacations and at celebrations and sometimes this works, but often it...
I really know? What I'm talking about?
Am I the only one left? Who gets annoyed any more? When presenters engage in uptalk?
When they end sentences? And sometimes even just a few words? With the rising intonation at the end that used to signal a question in Standard American English?
Wow. I find it grating to even read sentences punctuated that way.
Mark Liberman’s excellent Language Log blog educated me that uptalk is not, as I...
May 2011
6 posts
Jestem Polakiem
Poland now has the 6th largest economy in Europe, and was the only country on the continent to escape recession in recent years. As The Countess and I walked around Warsaw and Krakow over the past few days we passed by sushi bars, pet groomers, coffee and wine bars, Indian restaurants, dance schools, and huge H&M billboards.
The most concrete evidence that we were in Eastern Europe came to...
Learning To Take It Back
No, not my anti-Scrabble rant on CBC last Friday (starts at 23:40), which was based on this post. I recently learned the virtues of taking something else back.
I started doing crossword puzzles in high school when my mom got me a subscription to Games magazine, which was then edited by word-nerd legend Will Shortz. She thought that I might be just such a nerd, and she was right. I’ve done...
Pauline Kael and the Hacks, Craftsmen, and Artists
A great recent article by Sam Sacks in Open Letters Monthly reminded me that one of the most influential voices in my life as someone who thinks and writes for a living was Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s film reviewer from 1968 to 1991.
We got the New Yorker delivered to my home in Indiana all throughout my childhood and adolescence, and the magazine was like a periscope into a very...
Awesome, literally
Here are the opening words of Heda Margoulis Kovály’s memoir “Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968,” which I just learned about from this excellent article in The American Interest by Michael McDonald. Kovály, who was born in Prague in 1919, survived both the Nazis and Soviet Communists. Her book is about both of them. It begins
Three forces carved the landscape of...
Why I Hate Scrabble
Among my more literate (read ‘word nerd’) friends I’ve counted more Scrabble players than crossword solvers at every level of ability, from casual fans to true obsessives.
This is both wrong and bad. Scrabble demeans English, and should be abolished. Until we get the Constitution amended to that effect, we should at least shun Scrabble as a way to pass the time.
Scrabble is not...
Best Baseball Writing?
I’m heading to Fenway in a bit to, I have the bad feeling, watch the currently punchless Sox get stood on their heads by Felix Hernandez. I want baseball to bring me some joy today, so I thought I’d make a list of my favorite baseball writing in a bunch of different categories. I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you agree and disagree with, and what I’m leaving out.
...
April 2011
3 posts
The Blessed Field
To celebrate my birthday the Countess and I are going to Fenway Park tonight to watch the inexplicable Daisuke Matsuzaka and the Red Sox take on Seattle. My birthday started on a redeye back from that same city, but I was not on a plush charter flight as I’m sure the Mariners were; I was in a middle seat in coach with a screaming baby as a neighbor. Ambien did what it could, but it was still...
Some Words on Easter
I went to a Catholic high school. The religion didn’t stick to me, but Christ’s teachings did. It’s hard to imagine more radical ideas coming out of a subjugated people in the Middle East two thousand years ago, or more important ones for humankind.
Turn the other cheek. Let us love one another. Think of the poor, mournful, and merciful as blessed. Some ideas deserve to...
About this blog, and its title
The British author Roald Dahl is best known for his children’s fiction, including Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. However, he also wrote a lot of short stories for adults, most of which are strange, dark, and fantastic (if sometimes misogynistic).
“The Great Automatic Grammatizator” is about as close as he comes to science fiction....