Requiem

Barkley Andronovich was a difficult dog. I gave him the Andronovich when I was reading a Russian novel. Not War and Peace. (Hey, when you’ve read War and Peace you’ll work it into conversation, too.) Probably Anna Karenina. Russian novels are so comfortable to read, and the people are so itchy. Barkley was itchy. We’ve […]

The Best Lessons I Learned In School

1. “Necessary but not sufficient condition.” Geometry, 1992. Math is generally taught as if it is a tango, not a time to get down. Tango is too rigid for me. I never got to get down in math class the way I could when I was writing a paper. “Necessary but not sufficient” was one […]

Role Models

Patti Smith wanted to be Rimbaud. In “Just Kids,” she describes her pilgrimage to the Rimbaud museum in France. And her attempts to dress like him. I wanted to be Madeleine L’Engle. And Man Ray. I am a little L’Engle: Episcopalian (partly her influence, but T.S. Eliot helped), frequenter of Broadway plays, introvert, demurely and […]

Microcosm

I went to see “Cabaret” last week, and I am still worried about Herr Schultz. He’s the Jewish character who thinks the Nazi thing will blow over. The people who put on the Holocaust educators’ seminar I attended last summer were some of the smartest, kindest people I’ve ever met. The studies themselves were a […]