I attended two holiday movies, Avatar and Up In the Air, both of which delivered the promised shock and awe but which on balance provoked in me a quiet despair. And this felt bad. So, I’m out of step. But there’s a great article, “A World of Hits,” in The Economist that chases my blues with the insight that, hey, such a reaction may be a small downside of living in a blessed wealthy mass-consuming Democracy—tyranny of the majority and …
I eavesdrop on two groups, one male and one female, as they talk. Middle-aged men, two to four in the group, one talking loudly at a time: “You need to read more books!” “How are we going to solve the health care problem if . . .” “What gets me is these Republicans who say—” “This isn’t partisan—the Democrats . . . Obama . . . ” “We go to Wal-Mart and we buy this crap, and we don’t care …
I own a few sacred words, words of such beauty I desire to be worthy of them. I adore these watery two: lacustrine, of or pertaining to a lake, and pelagic, of or pertaining to the open seas or oceans. The oceans are mighty places, you know, and pelagic fishes must swim faster than their lacustrine kin. We try to capture our feelings with words, and we think more precisely and deeply with them. Therefore knowing the meaning of bumptious …
The more I consider words, the more beautiful and useful and strange they seem individually and in combination: What does “hopelessly endearing,” used in a recent New Yorker review to describe an actor’s smile, literally mean? Yet the phrase captures a doofus charm, and I can picture George Clooney pulling it off. I got frustrated with my own writing vocabulary when I felt I’d strung together about a dozen words to build a book-length manuscript. And it came to perplex …
If there’s a writer of any stripe on your holiday gift list, you could do worse than to buy The Paris Review Interviews, Vols. 1-4, a new boxed set that collects the journal’s fifty years of interviews with famous and emerging writers. (Take note, Claire and Tom!) E.B. White (1899–1985), gifted essayist and author of immortal children’s books, sat down for his interview with The Paris Review in 1969. The New Yorker’s great stylist, candid to the point of self-effacement, …
Annie Dillard, having announced her retirement from writing, now paints and draws. That’s her “Long Cloud,” above; to the right, her self portrait. Her web site offers fine prints at $350; there’s a limit of ten to be sold of each. Proceeds go to Partners in Health, which provides medical services for the poor in developing countries. I stumbled across her artwork and have no idea whether these pieces are still available, but she lists a dealer to contact. I’m …
Sam Pickering, on the English faculty at the University of Connecticut, was the model for Robin Williams’s character in the sentimental hit movie Dead Poets Society and is the author of eighteen books, fifteen of them lighthearted essay collections describing his “doings.” Sometimes he alternates with humorous stories about fictionalized characters from his Tennessee hometown. He publishes mostly with university presses—everyone gets a turn: when I was at Ohio University Press we published Deprived of Unhappiness, his tenth volume of …