Category: aging

We Look on in Fascination
For my 73rd Birthday Last Tuesday as I walked around Duke’s East Campus I saw the freshmen moving in (when I was at Duke, East Campus was for women; now it houses freshmen), all these fresh-faced, anxious, unformed young adults, and realized to my astonishment that it was fifty-five years ago that I did the same ...
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The Wild Man and the Schoolmarm
Appreciate Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice by Taizan Maezumi Roshi. Shambhala. 160pp. $19.59. ***** Ordinary Wonder: Zen Life and Practice by Charlotte Joko Beck. Shambhala. 240 pp. $17.95. ***** Dharma books wander into my life at exactly the right moment. Years ago, I picked up Taizan Maezumi’s Appreciate Your Life and, except for the title ...
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Name Droppers Extraordinaire
Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis. Knopf. 545 pp. $28.82 Country Girl: A Memoir by Edna O’Brien. Little, Brown. 368 pp. $27.94. Inside Story is a novel because Martin Amis chooses to call it one. It has novelistic sections, but the bulk of the book is a memoir of some writers who have been his good ...
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His Crime: He’s a Boor
And He’s Not the Only One There’s a confusion these days between boorish male behavior and sexual assault. Democratic candidates are being canceled if they look at a woman sideways while Republican candidates admit that they grab women by the pussy and nobody blinks an eye (except the woman in question. Ow, Donny. Those might be ...
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She Doesn’t Give a Rat’s Ass
I Care a Lot a film by J Blakeson. With Rosamund Pike, Peter Dinklage, Eliza Gonzalez, Diane Wiest. Streaming on Netflix. ***** I Care a Lot—a comedy—is the most morally despicable movie I’ve seen in years. The female protagonists are the most hateful characters I can recall in a film. It includes stomach-churning violence, has any ...
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Hem III
Hemingway | The Blank Page | 1944-1961 a film by Ken Burns and Kim Novick. Streaming on PBS **** The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918-1926 by Ernest Hemingway. Library of America. 850 pp. ***** There’s nothing about the writing or production values that makes this third episode of Hemingway not as good as the others, ...
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Portrait of a Lunatic (You Wrote About the Wrong Cousin, Iris Murdoch)
The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch. Penguin Classics. 495 pp. $20.00 ***** The Sea, the Sea has everything going for it. It’s large and expansive, beautifully written; it contains a wealth of fascinating characters; it traces a wild plot, where things keep happening that you can’t believe, and it comes to an emotionally satisfying confusion. ...
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Ode to Swimming
Get Back to Where You Once Belonged Yesterday I swam for the first time in over a year. Since 1985—that’s 35 years—I’d gone swimming at the Y three times a week. I’d been a jogger before that, but the North Carolina heat and my aching joints made me turn to swimming at the age of 37. I’d ...
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Alice’s Gaze
Losing Alice a series by Sigan Avin. On Apple TV. With Ayelet Zurer, Lihi Kornowski, Gal Toren. **** Losing Alice is one of the stranger things I’ve ever seen on a screen. It’s a movie about the creative process, the artistic careers of women and men, and the lengths to which people will go to create ...
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I Like Ike
The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer Volume II: A Friend of Kafka to Passions. Library of America. 856 pp. ***** Back in the days when Isaac Bashevis Singer’s stories appeared in the New Yorker, I never missed one. It was a thrill to read the work of a man who wrote so vividly, who seemed ...
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And Talk They Did
Let Them All Talk a film by Steven Soderbergh. With Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest, Candice Bergen, Gemma Chan, Lucas Hedges. Available on HBO Plus. ***** At one point in Let Them All Talk, a movie about three old college friends who do a crossing on the Queen Mary 2, Susan (Dianne Wiest) stops an awkward conversation ...
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Gone Fishin’
Haven’t Posted in a While I wanted to drop a line to my loyal readers to say that the reason I haven’t posted in a while is that I recently got an idea for a longer writing project and want to take a look at that. I never know if a longer project is going to ...
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The Height of her Powers
The Friend a novel by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books. 224 pp. $10.39. I don’t know how Sigrid Nunez does it. She seems to begin her novels any old place, with whatever event comes to mind, and moves on from there. She doesn’t tell stories chronologically or in any particular way, but they fall right into place. ...
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What Finally Matters
What Are You Going Through: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez. Riverhead Books. 224 pp. $19.59. ***** The idea sounds grim beyond belief. Our narrator—living in New York—has a friend in a nearby town who is dying of cancer. At first the woman seems to be in remission, but then the cancer comes back with a vengeance, ...
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Invitation to Die For
The White House Super Spreader Please Be Warned: This is a Rant. Usually I have better control of myself, but sometimes things get to be a little too much. This nomination was cursed from the start. I don’t mean that Justice Amy Coney (“Grin And”) Barrett won’t sail through the Senate and be confirmed as the next justice ...
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Damned Is Right
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson. Grove Press. 800 pp. $22.00. **** Four Men Shaking: Searching for Sanity with Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, and My Perfect Zen Teacher by Lawrence Shainberg. Shambhala. 134 pp. $16.95 ***** The story told in the first half of James Knowlson’s excellent biography is thrilling and fascinating. ...
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Take Me Out to the Flat Screen
And the Fake Noise Goes Wild! I don’t know if people have noticed, but it’s a great time to be a sports fan. The US Open of Tennis just happened, as did the Open of Golf; the basketball playoffs are in full swing and the baseball playoffs about to start, at the same time that the ...
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And Another Thing
My First Shrink II The most valuable thing my first therapist did for me was to suggest I could rearrange my life to do the thing I loved, that I didn’t have to stay in a job just because I was good at it or because it seemed safe. I could completely upend my life. It ...
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They Can’t Get Started
Shtisel a Netflix series (2 seasons of 12 episodes) by Along Zingman. With Doval’e Glickman, Michael Alom, Neta Riskin, Shira Haas, Zohar Shtrauss. ***** Like everyone else during the pandemic, my wife and I have been searching for streaming series that hold our attention. We’ve been through any number of suggestions—some of which seemed rather desperate—with ...
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He Published Himself
Lorenzo Milam 1933-2020 Forty years ago, The Sun magazine was not the polished publication it is today. It was printed on what I believe is called stock, rather than the slick paper the magazine currently uses. It didn’t have a vast staff—often the Editor was it—and didn’t pay its writers much, if at all. Each issue ...
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