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http://marksinthemargin.blogspot.com/ - Reflections on notable ideas from my Commonplace Book
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Dear Readers, Marks in the Margin will be hibernating during the forthcoming holiday season. Our regular broadcast schedule will resume at the first of the year. Richard Katzev rkatzev@teleport.com
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A ppetizer: Teaching Literature in Prison Soup: Books about Books Salad: The Power of Social Networks Main Course: History of Memoirs Desert: Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Coffee/Tea: Billy Collins Poetry
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After a lifetime dedication to the weekly New Yorker, I find myself reading less and less of each issue now. The magazine is no longer the literary periodical it used to be. It was literature that first drew me to the magazine and why I always looked forward to it so much. As a young high ...
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Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading…Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things. Robert Darnton ...
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Are you running out of bookshelf space? Do old writers simply fade away? What do the French do when a bookstore closes? Why do people gush over Proust? What happened to the books in the library? What can we learn from Sophocles?
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A few months ago Margie Boule, a widely read columnist for the Oregonian , the local newspaper in the town where I now find myself, says she would have “despised” someone who read with an e-book. Margie Boule is a reader, she loves books, and reports that she would have also called herself a ...
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Lapham’s Quarterly is a rather unique and to my mind a much needed periodical in that each issue is devoted to a single theme. It is usually explored by means of excerpts from a variety of contemporary and historical articles, books, essays, etc. The issue begins with an introductory essay ...
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There is a graphic in Steven Pinker’s review of Malcolm Gladwell’s recent collection of essays, What the Dog Saw , that says it all. Pinker’s review appeared in The Times Book Review of November 15th; the graphic is by Christoph Niemann. It is the clearest and the cleverest critique of ...
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Malcolm Gladwell
Steven Pinker
After much deliberation, uncertainty, hesitancy and all too much discussion of the matter, my wife has brought a cat, more properly a little kitten, into our home. She traveled some distance to select the kitten. You see, it isn’t just your ordinary cat, if you will pardon me just this once. ...
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T. S. Eliot
The Louvre Museum in Paris, the most visited museum in the world, with a collection of paintings ranging across every school, the home of the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory, etc. etc, is currently exhibiting a collection of prints and drawings of lists. At the invitation of ...
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“Even on those occasions when he had no active hand in something I wrote, the choices I made, the way I approached a subject, the order in which I told what I knew, the attitude I adopted were determined by his example and his influence.” Alec Wilkinson, My Mentor: A Young Man’s ...
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How often have you read a book about a marriage that worked? “Worked” is the correct word because the marriage that Kay Redford Jamison unfolds in her heartbreaking memoir, Nothing Was the Same , is now a memory. Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, ...
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Kay Thompson
There is a grey cloud hanging over many of William Trevor’s short stories in C heating at Canasta. The day is cloudy and misty, a melancholy mood surrounds the characters, their talk is reflective, nostalgic, and sad. In Folie a Deux a man returns to Paris alone and, while reading in a café, ...
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William Trevor
Over at the Wall Street Journa l Stephen Marche writes about the evolution of the book. He says, “It’s about what the book wants to be.” Meanwhile Sergey Brin contributes an Op-Ed defense of Google’s book digitizing program. He argues it will create the library that will last forever. The ...
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Lately I’ve been hearing one tale after another about the problems people are having with their medical care—can’t get an appointment, duplicate billing, failure to return calls, in some cases, calls that require immediate attention and finally perhaps the most frequent, incorrect or delayed ...
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Ever since I read it, I’ve been mulling over an article that appeared in the Times earlier this week. Like a persistent musical tune, it won’t go away. A psychiatrist described a man in a homeless shelter who lived “a life apart, without a home, friend or regrets.” “The staff at the homeless ...
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Nicci French
“ The reader will find many of my friends in this book, both friends that I know and…many whom I have never met, yet know through reading, through having been taught about them and by them.” This passage is from James Schall’s The Unseriousness of Human Affairs by way of Patrick Kurp on his ...
