We Have Met The Enemy And He Is NOT "Us"

Those old enough to remember the cartoon strip "Pogo" (my personal all-time favorite) know that the headline of this post is a paraphrase of one of Walt Kelly's most famous lines and it came to mind most recently when I read Viet Thanh Nguyen's piece "Your Writing Tools Aren't Mine" in the April 30, 2017, New York Times Sunday Book Review section.

"Flâneuse": More About Women Than Walking

The first chapter of "Flâneuse," a recent book by Lauren Elkin, makes a case that women can, or at least should be able to, enjoy an activity traditionally associated with a certain type of man: walking about a city more or less aimlessly, soaking up its serendipitous sights, sounds, aromas and pleasures. In short, becoming a connoisseur of the urban experience.

The original term, flâneur, apparently dates back to 16th or 17th century France, but wasn't widely referenced until the 19th century when it became principally associated with a description of such activity by the French poet Charles Baudelaire.

An Important Anniversary for Self Publishing

This is an important anniversary for self-publishing: the Hogarth Press is 100 years old.

In March 1917, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, then living at Hogarth House in the London suburb of Richmond, purchased a hand-operated printing press and with it, first published "Two Stories" in July of the same year -- Leonard's mostly forgotten "Three Jews" and Virginia Woolf's experimental, modernist work entitled "The Mark on the Wall."

Obama's Wall Street Fee: I Wish It Were Fiction

I've taken a couple of whacks at Donald Trump in the course of writing this blog and now I'm going to have to take one at his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Obama's apparent decision to accept a fee of $400,000 from Cantor Fitzgerald, a Wall Street investment banking and financial services firm, for making a speech at a healthcare conference this coming September is disgusting and disgraceful.

The Appeal of a Twist in Opera and Fiction

One well-known genre is the coming-of-age novel, represented perhaps most famously by J.D. Salinger's classic, Catcher in the Rye. The opposite might be called the fading-away novel, here represented by Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending.

First published in 2011, it won the coveted Man Booker Prize, but I just got around to reading it, and wasn't planning to write anything about it until I took a course from the Seattle Opera in how to write a libretto.

Apocalypse When?

Maybe it's global warming; maybe it's those mosquitos or the collapse of bee colonies; maybe it's Brexit, or maybe it's the election of Donald Trump, but apocalypse is in the air -- again.

The historical Jesus is generally described as an apocalyptic prophet who preached that the end -- the day of judgement -- was very near and all should be ready.  A couple thousand years later, we are still waiting. Those four horses we've been expecting -- self-driving electric vehicles instead?

Gender in Life and Fiction

Today's New York Times has an op-ed piece entitled "My Daughter Is Not Transgender. She’s a Tomboy." It's by Lisa Selin Davis,  author of a young adult novel called “Lost Stars,” and in the Times article, she describes how her seven-year-old daughter is constantly asked whether she wants to be identified as a boy because of the way she dresses and because of her shaggy, short hair.

This, of course, reflects America's current hypersensitivity about gender issues: the idea that gender is something one can choose, as opposed to something one is born with, and the idea that it is a violation of a person's civil rights if such choices -- perhaps not always obvious -- are not respected.