Best Esquire Magazine Stories - Top Articles in History of Journalism. By Richard Ben Cramer June 1986 Click here to read this story in its entirety!
"He's always first, 8:00 A.M., at the tennis club. He's been up for hours, he's ready. Excerpt - Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat. American Culture's Debt To Gay Sons of Harvard. George Santayana, F. O. Matthiessen, Lincoln Kirstein, Leonard Bernstein, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Philip Johnson: all of them Harvard men -- professors and students -- and all of them gay or bisexual. But is that news? ''The fact that, individually, they were gay is not news,'' said Douglass Shand-Tucci, the author of ''The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality and the Shaping of American Culture,'' recently published by St. Martin's Press. Zinsser on Friday: Men of Letters. Zinsser on Friday Print By William Zinsser “He never achieved the top rank of recognition that was predicted for him after the publication of his first novel, The End of My Life,” said The New York Times in its obituary of the American writer Vance Bourjaily, who died a few weeks ago at the age of 87, “but he had a long and substantial career in letters of the sort that was far more prevalent a half-century ago than it is today.”
Along with his novels, Bourjaily wrote short stories, essays, and book reviews and was also an editor and a teacher. He spent 20 years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and five at the University of Arizona, and then he founded the creative writing program at Louisiana State University. How quaint that term sounds today. When I’m in the Mood for Fiction. My appetite for fiction comes and goes and recently it’s been hard to find.
It’s no coincidence that during this period in which my bookmark has not moved from page 87 of Emma I’ve been feeling a little like Ishmael at the beginning of Moby-Dick, possessed of the urge to step into the street and begin knocking people’s top hats off. I have a hard time enjoying fictional characters when I’m feeling dreary towards the people who inhabit my real life. When I think about these recent months, and other times in my life when fiction has held less appeal, it occurs to me that a yen for fiction is something like my canary in the coal mine, an early indication, when it’s ebbs, that something else is wrong.
Over dinner the other night I asked my wife Caroline to describe what moods, for her, correlate with a desire to read fiction. Jonah and Yom Kippur Lithograph, John August Swanson.
"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sealine sound! What a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ A Place Where We Can Talk. By Brian Volck "Somewhere is better than anywhere.
"—Flannery O'Connor In my sophomore year of college, Professor Karanikolas took a semester to tear apart my writing—which until then I thought quite good—and rebuild it into something worth reading. He returned many of my early essays with marginal comments like, “Oh my God,” and “You’ve made the best of a very bad business here.” But the reeducation process was a painful necessity if I was ever to become a writer, and I’m grateful for those many hard lessons.
One of my later essays that semester included a sentence (the content of which I’ve long ago forgotten) that, by itself, would have been embarrassingly trite. His point—one that still informs my aesthetics—is that simple gestures are often stale and vacuous without preparatory context and much hard work. Revalorizing the Trades - The Chronicle Review. Camille Paglia Vanishing of jobs will plague the rest of this decade and more.
Meaningful employment is no longer guaranteed to dutiful, studious members of the middle class in the Western world. Soul Music — The American, A Magazine of Ideas. “The ways of poetry and music are not changed anywhere without change in the most important laws of the city.”
So wrote Plato in The Republic (4.424c). And Plato is famous for having given what is perhaps the first theory of character in music, proposing to allow some modes and to forbid others according to the character which can be heard in them. Move over Greene, Waugh and Belloc - Catholic Herald.
Happy 75th Birthday, Carl Oglesby! Louis Auchincloss, 1917-2010. Manhattan Monologues by Louis Auchincloss Houghton Mifflin, 226 pp., $25 THE NARRATOR of one of the stories in Louis Auchincloss's "Manhattan Monologues" notes that her father's name--Livingston Van Rensselaer Schuyler--sounds "like the take-off of an old New York moniker in a Harvard Hasty Pudding show.
" Or in a Louis Auchincloss story, she might have added. Slate. Ayn Rand: engineer of souls by Anthony Daniels. Essay - Only Disconnect. The Atlantic.