THE WORLD OF SPORT
What is being a sports fan really about? Is it just like an addiction to chess or light beer or mashed potatoes? Well, no; it's more than that. It makes you a citizen of a parallel world.A f…
What is being a sports fan really about? Is it just like an addiction to chess or light beer or mashed potatoes? Well, no; it's more than that. It makes you a citizen of a parallel world.A f…
Saturday, June 20, 2015. I read in the Times that the writer James Salter has died at age 90. He was a month younger than I, and a schoolmate in my senior year at the Horace Mann School (in …
Milan Kundera's essays illuminate music, painting and writing in the context of what he calls a "post-art" era.
Heroic efforts from the remarkable singing actresses Laura Benanti, Patti LuPone and Sherie Rene Scott and the equally accomplished Brian Stokes Mitchell can’t disguise the fact that &…
Whether you realize it or not, names are a part of language, and a by no means unimportant one. I am not even referring to such a somewhat esoteric phenomenon as a proper noun becoming a com…
With Gunter Grass, who just died at age 87, I had a brief friendship. I translated for him on a popular radio show, and I introduced him at his reading at the Y. I also met his charming firs…
Stupidity, I am sorry to say, is no joke, as it is portrayed on stage, screen and TV. It is the second worst crime against humanity and a very close runner-up to evil. It is neither necessar…
Pity the poor necktie, hanging on for dear life. Consider that male attire, unlike female, is, unless completely wacko, basically standardized. The lapel may get narrower or wider, the inden…
One of our greatest quandaries concerns illusion. Is it treacherous, undesirable, even harmful; or optimistic, consolatory, even life-sustaining? Is it near-synonymous with hope, and thus a …
The question of whether pets go to heaven seems these days to be getting ever greater attention, almost as much as in long ago days the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin…
To the question "What is poetry?" there is, let's face it, no definitive answer. A bad novel is still a novel, a poor story still a story. But an unworthy poem is doggerel or, at best, verse…