I bought for myself, as a belated holiday gift, a brand new Royal Scriptor II Portable Electric Typewriter. I’ve been yearning for a working typewriter for at least a year now. What finally pushed me to make the purchase was my recent realization that I’ve spent at least a third of my life for the…
Over the December holidays, I read Louis Menand’s article on dictionaries, “Look It Up” in The New Yorker. The article referred to a book by Stefan Fatsis, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary and who can resist a book on dictionaries? So, sitting poolside, I read Fatsis’s book with pleasure and…
I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. They seem, at my age, arbitrary. Things that a person can start at any time, they put off to the first day of the year, along with many other people. For me, the question is: why wait? That said, I do look at personal trends and things always…
The losses accrue and reminders are daily this time of year. Barry N. Malzberg died a year ago yesterday. We lost Carl Sagan twenty-nine years ago today. Both writers had an outsized influence on me. One, as a mentor, and writer whose subject matter and style resonated with me as no other writer before. The…
In the end it was primarily Robert Silverberg who took the hit. I’d gone to pull a copy of Dying Inside off the shelf to check the publication date. The book seemed stuck to the bottom of the shelf and when I pulled it off, I saw the bottom was black with some kind of…
Folks, I’m on a mission. I sat down today to jot down a list of books to read the last two weeks of the year. We abandon the cold and gray of winter in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area for the warmth and sunshine of gulf coast Florida for the last few weeks of the…
We recently replaced the “old” 55” flat-screen TV we have mounted above the fireplace in the living room with a brand new 65” flat-screen TV. Ordinarily a TV would last us a decade or more, but for some reason, the old TV started to get darker and darker, and it just seemed time. The new…
I. The Nine Planets The first time I experienced a sense of wonder was upon arriving home from the Franklin Township Public Library and tearing into the book I’d just checked out: a nonfiction astronomy by Franklyn M. Branley titled The Nine Planets. I was still learning to read, and I can clearly recall wondering…
In the summer of 2007, I traveled to Europe for a month and I brought with me, as entertainment for the flight, the recent James Bond hit Casino Royale. I spent my first few days in Europe in Venice, and as I walked about St. Mark’s Square, I was momentarily taken aback by its familiarity.…
I have been reading Robert D. Richardson’s 1995 biography Emerson: The Mind On Fire. I find myself more fascinated by Emerson’s use of notebooks than by his actual writing or transcendentalism. Halfway through the biography, it seems to me that Emerson thought through his notebooks. By the end of his life, he’d filled hundreds of…
The September / October issue of Smithsonian Magazine has a fantastic article by Richard Grant on Cormac McCarthy’s library. Over the years, I’ve read just three of McCarthy’s books: No Country for Old Men in 2018, and more recently the dual novel / novella The Passenger and Stella Maris, both of which were among my…