There are a lot of books I look forward to reading, and even a few I look forward to re-reading. Among that smaller, second set is Swann’s Way, the first book of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, The Search for Lost Time, better known but perhaps worse translated as A Remembrance of Things [...]
I suspect not. Lynn Hirschberg’s final celebrity profile for the NYT Magazine knocks the musician M.I.A. down a notch or two on the credibility scale. M.I.A., aka Maya Arulpragasam, comes across as possibly well-meaning, but also self-righteous and misguided. (And reminds us of how much we love the term “radical chic.”) Hirschberg includes little observations [...]
Diane Dale and I encountered each other on the expo floor at Greenbuild last month. It was a Thursday afternoon, the 20th of November, and the conference was in full swing. We’d initially walked past each other without quite realizing it, but were soon standing together in the middle of one of the paths between [...]
“Crunch!”? Really? A huge cargo ship bumps into the Bay Bridge and spills 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel–not just oil, but bunker fuel–and this is the Chronicle’s headline? Is it supposed to be a joke? When I looked at my copy this morning, I originally thought this was a feature recapping some little disaster that I [...]
Grace Paley died two days ago. She was a sweet and humane poet and short story writer, one of those individuals for whom many will admit a familiarity with the name if not a specific knowledge of the work because some high school English teacher somewhere along the line (but a fan, truly) assigned a [...]
In 2001, not long after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said that people “need to watch what they say, watch what they do…” It was an unfortunate comment that was rightly criticized for its implicit threat against anyone who did not say the “right” things. It was also a [...]
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