Back in 1979-1980, then in 1985 and 1993, my wife, the anthropologist Alma Gottlieb, and I lived in small, remote villages of the Beng people of the Ivory Coast. In recent days Alma and I have found it difficult to watch the tragic news coming from the country: videos of military strikes and violence in [...]
After my last post, on the units of structure Shakespeare employed in his plays, scenes arranged as diptychs and triptychs, I thought I’d continue my thoughts on structure in writing by quoting a prose poem by the poet David Ignatow, titled “The Life They Lead”: “I wonder whether two trees standing side by side really [...]
More years ago than I like to count, when I was but a first year graduate student in creative writing, I came upon a slim volume in a bookstore titled Shakespearean Design, by Mark Rose. I pulled it off the shelf and gave it a glance, because I was taking a summer literature course on [...]
One of my favorite novels in recent years is I, the Divine (A Novel in First Chapters), by the Lebanese-American writer Rabih Alameddine. It’s a brilliant novel in the form of a memoir, written by one Sarah Nour El-Din, and it’s an evolving memoir at that, which is where the subtitle comes in. Every chapter [...]
A recent post on the website Brevity quotes the grandmaster essayist Philip Lopate on the creation of character in nonfiction, developing one’s “I” into a recognizable personality with enough complexity to be capable of variation, change. As Lopate says, “the writer needs to build herself into a character. And I use the word character much [...]
Black Friday has come and gone, so has Black Monday, and still there are nearly three weeks left of holiday shopping. When I have a chance to slip out unnoticed, off I go alone in search of presents for my wife and children. Yet as I enter a store, am I so solitary? When I [...]
Though I’ll happily plunk down the dough for a ticket to anywhere—travel being one of my major food groups—when I’m home, I’m home, happy to settle in with a few simple needs. Just give me some music (currently South African singer Simphiwe Dana, French guitarist Thierry Robin’s Kali Sultana, and Warpaint’s The Fool are in [...]
Because I am a lover of islands—I prefer being water-locked to land-locked—this past week I have been paging through with increasing delight Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands. First off, her book’s subtitle jumps out at you: “Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will.” Some islands, I suppose, are better for [...]
Summer has faded away, though warm days still linger, and I find myself marking how fresh figs, peaches, plums and nectarines vanish from the market. Of these I miss figs the most, their season is so short, and the dried version of a fig is such an inadequate substitute—it’s almost a slur on the original. [...]
The vast majority of the world in which we live is invisible, I believe. Every object around us was initially conceived and shaped by an unseen complex of synaptic connections in someone’s mind, and nearly every conversation we conduct is guided not so much by the words we speak but by the vast stretch of [...]
