It seems wrong to structure this as obit, somehow. No one who writes words like that really ends, do they? Elmore Leonard writes–wrote, it’s wrote–with such a pungent, fierce, sly, inspiring, dizzying command of the language, mostly because he understood … Continue reading My Writers: Elmore Leonard
I checked out quite a few plays from the campus library where I went to college. This wasn’t a result of budding theater fandom or idle curiosity, but stemmed directly from the movie review radio program I co-produced and co-hosted. As much as I reasonably could, I tried to consume the source material of films adapted from other mediums before sitting before the newer works as they flickered on the movie screen. Given the limited time I had–I did have assigned text that I was supposed to be reading, after all–I often decided to trying to read plays was a … Continue reading My Writers: Terrence McNally
“He loves me because I’m the kind of person people come to. It’s an attribute he wishes he had, because he’s a teacher. He teaches history in a private school. One time, when we were walking through Chelsea late at night, a nicely dressed old lady leaned over her gate and handed me a can of green beans and a can opener and said, ‘Please.’ On the subway, a man handed me a letter and said, ‘You don’t have to say anything, but please read the paragraph. I just want somebody else to see it before I rip it up.’ … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
“Back at the beach, Doc collapsed on his couch and drifted toward sleep, but scarcely had he penetrated the surface tension and sunk into REM than the phone began a god-awful clanging. Last year a crazed teenage doper of Doc’s acquaintance had stolen a fire bell from his high school as part of a vandalism spree, and next morning the youth, overcome with remorse and having no idea what to do with the bell, came to Doc and offered it for sale. Downstairs Eddie, who had put in some time with the phone company and was handy with a soldering … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
“So you suffer through the night with the perfect-on-paper man–the stutter of jokes misunderstood, the witty remarks lobbed and missed. Or maybe he understands that you’ve made a witty remark but, unsure of what to do with it, he holds it in his hand like some bit of conversational phlegm he will wipe away later. You spend another hour trying to find each other, to recognize each other, and you drink a little too much and try and little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long … Continue reading Great Moments in Literature
I reserve a significant amount of my personal allotment of scorn for Rolling Stone magazine, mostly due to the misguided impressions it gave me about which portions of classic rock history merited veneration (they sure did like creaky British dudes … Continue reading My Writers: William Greider
When I started this series, I did so with a list of fifteen favorite writers I included in response to a Facebook meme. Since I decided to dutifully track through them, my first dozen-plus entries were predetermined. I’ve now gone … Continue reading My Writers: Dave Eggers
I really wanted to be a science fiction fan when I was in middle school and high school. It seemed the proper extension of my geeky interest in comic books, albeit an extension that, I felt at the time, carried … Continue reading My Writers: Harlan Ellison
This weekend, I’ll participate in The World’s Largest Trivia ContestTM. I’m a little preoccupied with preparations for that, including some significant travel. To provide some sense of the madness of minutiae that dominates my mind this week, I’ll return to … Continue reading Trivia Answer of the Day: The Oklahoma Kamikaze
My efforts for Spectrum Culture this week began with an incredibly difficult movie to write about: Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color. The movie is so densely inscrutable that any attempt to summarize it (or even more daunting, to speculate on its meaning) is practically doomed to failure. I feel I did all right, but I’m actively looking forward to writing on what appears to be a fairly simple documentary for this coming week. On the music side, I wrote about the new album from Caitlin Rose, which is very solid. Though I didn’t make this comparison in the review, it reminded … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Coffee for Two 