Alan Arkin & American Artistry
When it rains, it pours, so of course news breaks that the beloved, completely irreplaceable Alan Arkin has left us earthlings behind for better adventures. Before he became the always-lovable…
When it rains, it pours, so of course news breaks that the beloved, completely irreplaceable Alan Arkin has left us earthlings behind for better adventures. Before he became the always-lovable…
The first rule of writing is to understand, and eventually embrace the fact that there are no rules. There are also no short-cuts. (Sorry, posers.) Writing, like life, is ultimately…
Cormac McCarthy was, like another uber-masculine (albeit polar opposite, aesthetically) writer of the old school, Philip Roth (more on him, here), an artist who did the work. Shunning the spotlight, apparently…
"Etonne-moi!" --Serge Diaghilev, to Jean Cocteau Adam Gopnik, the prolific and brilliant writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker for several decades, has a timely piece in The New York Times that…
Martin Amis poses for a photographer June 12, 2000 at a book signing at the Beverly Hills Library in Beverly Hills, CA. (by Frederick M. Brown/Online USA) Style is not…
Martin Amis was not merely the supreme literary stylist of his generation, his non-fiction was, arguably (unbelievably) possibly even better than his fiction. An absolute master, and incomparable in every…
Another wonderful Facebook memory prompts me to recall how incredibly productive things were, this time seven years ago, albeit not in the ways I'd intended. To recap, I headed up…
My thanks to the excellent journal 805 Lit + Art for publishing my poem Hagler and Hearns, 1985. I’m especially grateful because, let’s face it, arguably the only thing more esoteric than poetry about jazz is poetry…
Eric Dolphy’s Avowal* Eric Dolphy’s alto is less a solo than an announcement: not unlike a boisterous child acting out in the rear pew, where everyone gradually comprehends, he is…
Art is long, and Time is fleeting, Longfellow wrote, and we’d already read it—words largely if not entirely lost on the average university freshman. It was 1989, and I was…