Cursive

Michelle, myself and I: some advice for Barack Obama from the much-neglected Department of Pronouns.
The Atlantic’s Barbara Wallraff and Joe Pickett of the American Heritage Dictionary are having a polite conversation about polite conversation.
“It’s not about unrequited tragic love,” observes Sancho Panza of Engelbert Humperdinck’s operatic version of Hansel and Gretel, “it’s about eating …”
“I [...]

Not Fade Away

“He stops in the middle and just strums the rhythm…” Daniel Arizona remembers Buddy Holly.
Christopher Guerin lists 46 authors who can be relied upon to produce a novel regularly every couple of years.  There’s only one problem: “the list is pretty much the same as it was ten years ago.”  And they’re all getting old [...]

Im-portant

More handwriting,  this time from the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian.

A 1930 letter from American realist painter George Luks to Samuel Ross Ballin, the “dean” of New York bakruptcy lawyers.   At the time, Ballin was helping to assemble property to create Rockefeller Center, one of the largest privately-financed building projects of the 20th [...]

Find Out What it Means to Me

In a recent article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University has taken up the ancient and honorable practice of suggesting how academics may earn social prestige, particularly now that the nation seems to have embraced a President that columnist Nicholas D. Kristof calls “an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.”
The perception is [...]

Repast

“Would I write on my blog if I’d been rejected in some way?”  Petrona wonders.
“If it’s a massive overwhelming storm of adrenaline, calcium keeps pouring into the cells and the muscle just can’t relax.”  Yes, folks, you can die of fright …
Wowee.  Thanks to Frank Wilson for the hot tip on George Tooker exhibited at [...]