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The First Pitch
Wednesday February 6, 2008
I can recall the first time that I heard ‘classical’ music. My mother had just retrieved the long disabled record player back from the repair shop and put on an LP to test it out. For a kid of seven or eight, the novelty of the thing must have brought me into the room to see how this contraption worked. On the A side of the record was a recording of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with Oscar Levant as the soloist.
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Braving the Field
Tuesday February 5, 2008
I picked up Choice, an anthology of women’s stories of infertility, adoption, and abortion, while roaming a bookstore on Christmas Eve. Ever since a college course in reproductive ethics led me to convert from my family’s pro-choice stance to a politically bewildered pro-life position, I’ve been addicted to personal narratives of abortion decisions. Call me morbid, call me a conflicted seeker; whether recounted in a slick documentary or on an abandoned blog, but I find the stories of women and men who have faced this decision to be far more compelling than anything spouted by the talking heads.
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Picket Line in Babylon
Monday February 4, 2008
I have to admit: I would love to see the Oscars cancelled. Not for the power trip that we, the lowly scribes of the Writers Guild, brought Hollywood to its knees; I would be just as happy, if not more so, to see a union of caterers or make-up artists do the same.
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Robinson and Me
Sunday February 3, 2008
Edwin Arlington Robinson grew up in Gardiner, Maine; I live a couple of blocks from his house, which still stands. Nothing much changes here. The brook that ran beside Robinson’s childhood bedroom now runs by mine.
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Auden, God, & Art
Saturday February 2, 2008
I’m always a few months behind in my magazine reading, so it was only recently at breakfast that I opened the December 7, 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books to Edward Mendelson’s review-essay, “Auden and God.”
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Current Issue
Issue 57
The sculpture of Richard Serra, Franz Wright on the Gospels, interview with Ron Hansen, fiction by Pinckney Benedict
Good Letters: The Image Blog
