Bartholomäus Spranger’s “Minerva (Athena) Victorious Over Ignorance” (circa 1591), oil on canvas. Kunsthistoriches Museum.
It was another challenging week bookended by ice and snow on the East Coast and wildfires in California. I have no expertise to offer in alleviating the devastation wrought by wildfires, but I do have some thoughts on preventing the havoc wreaked by six inches – yes, a mere six inches – of snow, sleet and rain in New York.
Read MoreThe modern Democratic Party donkey logo in fighting mode.
For a while there, it was looking like déjà vu all over again, with Democratic hopes raised only to be dashed. But by golly, if the Dems didn’t snatch victory from the jaws of defeat to come back late in the evening of a nail-biting election day to take back the House of Representatives.
Read MoreBruce MacKinnon’s cartoon appeared in The Chronicle Herald Sept. 29.
So Brett Kavanaugh becomes a United States Supreme Court Justice and that’s too bad, because he lacks the temperament for it, as he himself demonstrated, and because other revelations – an inability to confront a drunken youth, questionable credit card charges and a good deal of misremembering – would seem to indicate an injudiciousness that would be lethal for a judge….
Read MoreNathanial Hone the Elder’s “Portrait of Catherine Maria ‘Kitty’ Fisher” (1763-64).
#MeToo meets me first: Christine Blasey Ford testifies against Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The historical past is always with us to offer encouragement or caution. But the social past – the who said what to whom on Thanksgiving – is dead to us as it must be if we are to move on. The exception to this is the egregious act that we never confront and that therefore continues to fester into a cancer….
Read MoreI tend to use this headline to write about young men who have a disproportionate rage at the world and take it out on others as mass murderers, assassins, terrorists and serial killers. I’ve also written about a number of literary works that deal with such young men – Homer’s “The Iliad,” John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” among them.
But I think it is also an appropriate title for a post about the Lambda Literary Awards, which I attended Monday night at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts as a nominee. My book “The Penalty for Holding,” published by Less Than Three Press, the second novel in the series “The Games Men Play” was a finalist in the Best Bisexual Fiction category. (When I got the news, I had two thoughts: This must be an email for somebody else. And, were any of the characters in my book bisexual? It goes to show that the readers sometimes know more than the authors do.)
As I sat there, I had a feeling of disassociation. I didn’t know anyone …
Read MoreIn my guise as editor in chief of WAG magazine, I had a pleasure of sharing a moment with Ashley Judd on the red carpet of the Greenwich International Film Festival (GIFF) in Connecticut Friday night. She is an exquisite-looking woman who is, more important, exquisite in her manners and manner. I began by thanking her for her work as one of the leaders of #MeToo and asked her if she thought that this time, the response to the sexual harassment women have suffered would really be different.
It already is, she said, and the result will be an improvement not only in the lives of women but of men as well. …
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