Congratulations to Coliseum contributor Michael Antman for being a finalist for the Balakian Award given by the National Book Critics Circle for reviewing excellence. You can read some of his literary essays and reviews here.
“It is a good thing for an uneducated man,” Winston Churchill declared, “to read a book of quotations.” It is certainly a good way to grow familiar with much that Churchill had to say. If the book is the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations (Oxford University Press, $18.95), you will even learn what he didn’t say.
One of the more famous things attributed to him is a remark about De Gaulle: “Of all the crosses I have had to bear in this war, the heaviest has been the Cross of Lorraine.” That, however, was originally said not by Churchill, but by Edward Spears, a British soldier and diplomat. But Churchill knew a good line when he heard one and accordingly appropriated Spears’s quip later on. (What has the Cross of Lorraine got to do with De Gaulle? Originally associated with Joan of Arc, the heraldic Cross of Lorraine — which has two crossbars, one shorter than the other — was adopted as a symbol by the Free French forces, which De Gaulle led.)
Churchill’s remark about books of quotations comes from a 1930 volume of his titled My Early Life. He goes on to say that “the quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.”
Of course, all of us, whether educated or not, miss plenty of things, or don’t pay proper attention to them, or forget them. So we can all use a volume of quotations from time to time. But apart from their utility, such books are just fun to have around. If I were still commuting on public transit, the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations would routinely make its way into my briefcase. [Read more →]
Okay, I admit it. I read The Secret. Loved it. Have the “wish board,” or whatever you call it. At the risk of sounding crazy, I have to agree that there is something to this “power of positive thinking” or “Law of Attraction” deal. For those of you who’ve somehow managed to escape hearing about it, the basic premise is that what you think about is what you bring to your life, good or bad.
Near the end of 2008, I decided that I wanted to write a book. And I did. I just kind of asked for the words to come and they did. 44, 461 words, in fact. I don’t really know how, seeing as I have no previous writing experience or training, but it happened and I’m grateful.
Getting what you ask for works in mysterious ways, too. Everyone has heard the phrase, “Be careful what you wish for, because it may come true.” When I asked for money to come my way, I wasn’t expecting it to come in the form of a severance check after being laid off. But hey, I didn’t ask how to get it, I just asked for it.
Scott Stein and I have known each other via internet for some time, but it was only this past November that I had an opportunity to see him in person. We met up for lunch and a beer. We had an excellent time (at least from my point of view), discussing a wide range of topics ranging from serious to not. But there was one uncomfortable moment which I feel I must address, one comment I made that seemed to wound Scott very deeply.
You see, I have placed more than a thousand of my books in a storage locker.
Nearly every morning last year I went into my office with a single intent — to write. Something. Anything. Nothing. Instead, other than the few posts made here, I have managed to play 386,427 games of spider solitaire. Sadly, I don’t win often, but I do have an impressive twelve-win run in easy mode, which is totally pathetic.
I am discouraged.
Rest assured that there is an abundance of gross incompetence, general stupidity, and blatant disregard for truth and justice in the world that I would gladly comment on. At this very moment there are dozens of diatribes dancing around in my head fighting to find a direct pipeline to my keyboard.
This is not a case of writer’s block. There are big, big, big things going on that piss me off and I, like thousands of others in the blogosphere, have opinions and judgments that I think are unique, brilliant, and deserving of being blasted throughout the universe because, well, um, I am right and you are wrong.
No, this is not writer’s block. My deserving diatribes on the big issues are not absent. My truth is out there. But unlike everyone else in the blogosphere, I am the victim of a cruel conspiracy. My rage has been stolen and broadcast as a ‘special comment’ by Keith Olbermann. [Read more →]
No writer is quoted more reflexively than Shakespeare, which is too bad, because Will’s best lines not only repay close attention, but often demand it. Take the advice Polonius gives his son Laertes:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Spoken like a true courtier, which is what Polonius is — a temporizing careerist whose summum bonum is survival. He is also a “wretched, rash, intruding fool,” as Hamlet — uncharitably, but accurately — calls him after impulsively running the old duffer through in Act III.
It seems safe to say that, for Polonius, being true to yourself means nothing more than giving top priority to your own self-interest. My guess is that, in Polonius’s view, everyone is out for himself, and that this defines the extent to which anyone can trust anybody else — which is to say, hardly at all. It is a supremely cynical outlook, and how exactly it ensures against being false to anyone else is far from clear.
There is another play in which the notion of being true to yourself figures: Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. When Peer visits the trolls, the troll king explains that the difference between humans and trolls is that while, among humans, the maxim is “to thine own self be true,” among trolls it is “to thine own self be — enough.”
But how do those differ, really? In both cases, the standard remains … yourself. [Read more →]
OK. I admit it. For me, getting into the “Holiday spirit” this year has been more difficult than shoving a camel into a needle’s eye. Even though both my wife and I were raised in the Christian tradition, we do have Christmas lights, we do have an (artificial) tree, and we do have a bevy of berry-covered decorations, nothing is up yet. More, every trip to the grocery store and its continuous Holiday music gives me shivers. I’m actually tired of Bing Crosby and have begun, secretly, to hope for anything other than snow this season. So, go ahead if you want, call me “Scrooge.” I’ll just offer up another litany of humbugs.
But can you really blame me?
You see, this week, I packed up a box of personal belongings from my cell-like cubicle and made that confused walk to my car for the last drive home from work. I suspect, unless you’re really lucky, you’ve seen people clutching those small boxes packed with family photos and random mementos, and maybe you’ve even noticed that dazed look in their eyes. You know, the one that says, um, well, what now?
First, the story, then the story behind the story.
The Stacker
by Scott Stein
The stack was developing as a sort of snowflake, with a symmetry as unconventional as it was unconditional. The columns at the snowflake’s outer tips consisted of the rectangular crates, which grew larger as they neared the ceiling, and the crates with still more sides also grew progressively larger throughout the stack. The stack was sorted by code in a diagonal pattern, both alphabetically and numerically, and a chessboard arrangement had also emerged, with the alternation of light and dark wood crates throughout.
Had the Stacker intended all of it? [Read more →]
I find it disconcerting to realize that it has been more than half a century since I first read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” At least I know I’ve had plenty of time to think it over. I’ve read it a number of times since then, of course, but that first encounter has stayed in my mind with extraordinary vividness. It took place in February 1957. I was 15, a sophomore in high school. But I had stayed home from school that day because of a bad cold — for some reason colds affected me worse when I was young than later on.
The day was very clear and very cold. The bedroom where I sat reading was filled with dazzling winter sunlight. I don’t remember why I decided to read “Self-Reliance.” It was in an anthology of classic American literature that we had lying around the house. I knew that Emerson was supposed to be an important writer, so maybe I just decided to see if he lived up to his reputation.
He sure did for me. “Self-Reliance” hit me like a personal declaration of independence. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds….” “To be great is to be misunderstood.” What bookish adolescent wouldn’t thrill to such words?
Conformism was much talked about at the time. Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit — which had to do with conformity as exemplified by corporate yes men — had come out two years earlier and its screen adaptation hit theaters the year before. Maybe that’s what made Emerson’s essay seem so up-to-date.
At any rate, it was not those famous quotes from “Self-Reliance” that grabbed me so much as this one: [Read more →]
My writing partners and I just finished a series of children’s books. Seven, to be exact. It is a brilliant series that chronicles the week of a wonderfully charismatic little girl that just so happens to have two moms. Close your mouths people, you heard me correctly. Two moms. It’s crazy, I know. What’s crazier is the gaping hole that exists in the children’s book market when it comes to books that represent a child with same sex parents. There are a few out there. But most of them are about the fact that the parents are gay. Few are about anything else.
Here’s my personal side of the story. When my daughter was born, within a week I received Heather Has Two Mommies from my mother. She told me that she was surprised that at such a large bookstore (I don’t want to name names, but it rhymes with Shmarnes and Shmobles) she was only able to find the one book. I immediately felt my stomach sink. [Read more →]
Michel de Montaigne invented the essay, and could well be the only person to have ever written one. Plenty of things called essays have been written, of course, and many — Lamb’s, Hazlitt’s, Emerson’s — are justly celebrated. But none are exactly like the ones Montaigne wrote.
In a way, they are just the opposite. Montaigne invented the name, too. It comes from the French word essayer, meaning to try or attempt. You could say that to write an essay about something means just to take a stab at it. Montaigne’s began as brief commentaries on favorite classical quotations, but soon expanded into wide-ranging meditations — the quotations became simply a means of triggering a train of thought, which Montaigne would then follow wherever it led.
This is what makes his essays different from those others, most of which have served as vehicles either for exposition or style or both. To be sure, Montaigne’s writing is stylish enough. He invented the plain style, clear and casual as the best talk. But for him style wasn’t an end itself; like a window, it was meant to be looked through, not at.
Montaigne also doesn’t seem to have arrived at any conclusion before he began to write. The point of his writing wasn’t to advance a position, but to record a process of thought. This is writing as an act, first and foremost, of self-examination, not self-expression (though it is that as well, of course). I have long thought a great opportunity has been missed in the failure to explore the essay as a method rather than a form.
But what about journals and diaries? Aren’t they examples of writing as a method of self-examination? Usually, though some, like Gide’s, are pretty clearly private performances meant for public consumption. The difference, however, between what a diarist does and what Montaigne did lies in the indirectness of his method: Montaigne explores himself strictly in relation to his chosen topic — such as one of those classical quotations. This enables him to get to know himself, not by recounting and pondering his quotidian round, but by seeing how his mind works.
Which brings me to the point of this column, in which I plan to try my hand at Montaigne’s opening gambit by riffing on a quotation every week. [Read more →]
I am a book collector and have a weakness for modern first editions, although many of these are no longer in my price range (or that of anyone I know). And so, on a Saturday morning last April, I dropped by the Park Avenue Armory, site of the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, hoping to simply say hello to a few dealer friends, peruse the books quickly, and get back home in time to catch the Mets-Braves game. As it happened, I found a nice copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five. But what really interested me was a rather incongruous sideshow, also with a wartime theme.
After a break of about a year, I started reading the Wall Street Journal again just this week, and promptly encountered the following rather disturbing passage, in a page one feature article about the 300th and final bout of a British boxer, Peter Buckley, who’d lost 256 out of his 299 previous matches:
“With five seconds left Friday night, Mr. Buckley unleashed a wild swing for the last punch of his professional career. It missed.
“The bell rang. The crowd rose. Peter Buckley’s name filled the air of a boxing arena for the first, and last, time.
“The judge’s decision came quickly. The score was 40 to 38 points. A tattooed arm was held up. The perennial loser had won.”
I’ll explain why this particular passage bothered me so much in a moment, but first a word about a word: “Crapitulation.” [Read more →]
I’m starting a blog. This thing. Here. My husband is terrified. I’ve told him I will be writing about him — but really — I’ll be writing about lots of things. Let me introduce myself…
I lived in the same house in Queens, New York from birth until college. I went to the University of Miami, largely because my brother went there, partly because I got a very small scholarship, gladly because I ended up in the communications school. I met my husband in November of my freshman year. We met through a mutual friend who wanted us to hang out but didn’t want us to “hang out.” That was 16 years ago. We have two kids under five who crack me up day-in and day-out. I may mention them from time-to-time.
My parents recently moved in with us. My husband suggested it. I agreed. My dad is a loud talker and my mom thinks she knows everything, literally. Annoyingly, eighty percent of the time she is right. And really, I am not sure how we’d do it without them. My days are hectic, like everyone else. I work full-time, try to spend as much time with my family as possible, and when I have a moment to myself I am usually so exhausted I go to bed. Well, not anymore. Now I will blog — because I have lots to say. Will you read me? Well, let’s hope it gets more interesting than this!
In a transient, mobile, pseudo-egalitarian society such as modern America, it makes sense that the population would self-segregate by interest and familiarity to some degree. It’s not wrong. It’s human nature.
Robert: I’ve been thinking about the amazing number of online sites and magazines out there. Do you think people who write for these sites actually read the work of others on those sites? I’m sensing we’re in the “I write for it but don’t read it” era of writing and publishing. Perhaps it has always been thus. I don’t know if most contributors to academic publications read most of the work in the publications they write for … am I wrong? Yet now the proliferation of sites makes the imbalance between writing and reading more pronounced. And of course there is the question of whether there is anything wrong with this emphasis on production and writing as opposed to reading? As a teacher, I too am emphasizing writing more than reading, trying to get my students to write their way into engaging a subject. Any thoughts on this?
Paula: You raise a point that does have application to myself. I write for lots of journals, both print and online, and I certainly don’t read everything in those journals. [Read more →]
We are pleased to announce that Mean Martin Manning, a novel by our very own Scott Stein, was reviewed yesterday by the American Spectator:
Crafting a breezily subversive, funny narrative out of a barely hyperbolized modern American zeitgeist, Stein spins perhaps a bit too-timely-for-comfort cautionary tale.
Read the whole thing.
Plenty has been written about humans bonding with dogs (Old Yeller, The Call of the Wild, The Voice of Bugle Ann) or with horses (National Velvet, The Black Stallion), but not much about humans bonding with birds. Which seems strange, since falconry certainly has an ancient pedigree (the earliest evidence of it dates to the eighth century B.C.).
Nowadays birds are pretty popular. According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, nearly 48 million Americans have taken up bird-watching as a hobby. Throughout the pleasanter months of the year a good many of those millions will take to field, forest and wetland to renew their acquaintance with the feathered flocks.
Most will engage in just looking at them, hoping to add another name to the list of those they’ve seen. But avian encounters can prove a good deal more profound than that, as two books in the outstanding NYRB Classics series conclusively demonstrate. [Read more →]
“How do you find the time to write?” is a question that I, and surely other writers, am often asked.
My answer is, “You don’t find time — you make time.” [Read more →]
In graduate school I went through phases. I had my Cormac McCarthy phase, my Don DeLillo phase, my Tim O’Brien phase. Like a young athlete emulating his heroes, I paid homage to mine by copying their prosaic technique, voice, and style. McCarthy’s sweeping vision, and long, stark, near-Biblical sentences; DeLillo’s twisting language and genius sensibility; O’Brien’s subtle potency, the conveyance of confusion, tragedy, and strange beauty in war. Story after story I tried to incorporate these traits and elements into my own work, until my advisor told me, “You’re not Cormac McCarthy. Or DeLillo. Or Tim O’Brien. Just be you.”
The problem was that I didn’t know who I was. [Read more →]
