The Bookends column of The New York Times Book Review – which each week poses a provocative question that two writers then answer in essay form, often offering diametrically opposed viewpoints – had a goodie for Thanksgiving weekend: “Are domestic responsibilities at odds with becoming a great artist?”
It’s a question I’ve wrestled with periodically but particularly at holiday time when gathering with married family members makes me acutely aware of my singleton status. I often suspect that the invitations are accompanied by a tacit, “Poor thing, what else would she do, where else would she go?” as much as by a genuine desire to see me. And, indeed, if this were the 19th-century such a woman would be an object of pity, Jane Austen notwithstanding. ...
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Read MoreI’m the same age as Gwen Ifill – the woman who made TV history with Judy Woodruff on “The PBS NewsHour” as the first female co-anchors of a network news broadcast and who died of endometrial cancer Monday in Washington D.C. – so I’m old enough to remember earlier iterations, “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” and “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.” Both were anchored by two white men. And though Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer were fine journalists in the Walter Cronkite tradition, theirs were the faces I had seen since childhood.
People will tell you that affirmative action is needless and that you should only look for role models within your immediate circle, but I have to tell you that seeing two women of my vintage, including one of color, on my TV each evening, doing excellent journalism, was a comfort and a source of pride to me, a fellow journalist. I felt I could be enlightened by them without their well-groomed presences taking pride of place. It was their well-groomed minds that inspired. ...
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Read MoreI’m still trying to wrap my mind – and, more difficultly, my heart – around the presidential election. You can talk about the failure of the Democrats to appeal to working-class voters; their reliance on the Barack Obama coalition (blacks, Latinos, women, millennials), which did not hold for the Dems – at least not in great enough numbers, and that includes you, Colin Kaepernick; a certitude, a smugness even, that wasn’t justified; the role of F.B.I. director James Comey in underscoring the tightening race in the last two weeks before the election; but at the end of the day, it was all about the zeitgeist.
Donald Trump was not merely the “change” candidate, again (Remember when Obama was the change candidate?); he was the regular-guy billionaire you could sit down and have a cheeseburger with, the one who understood America’s deeply ingrained nativist, isolationist, homogenous longings. This has always been – for all our forays into wars around the world – a determinedly inward-looking country. ...
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Read MoreToday I could be writing the latest installment in My Big Fat Greek Odyssey or about the particularly New York aspect of this presidential election. I could be considering Tim Tebow’s new book “Shaken,” and how he may not have necessarily heeded God’s word – something central to his life – in resisting the suggestion of becoming a halfback as his career as a quarterback fizzled, or contrasted him with bad boy tennis player Nick Kyrgios, who has the talent for his sport but, apparently, not the temperament.
All in good time, though, for nothing is more important right now than this historic – and historically ugly – presidential election and making a case for rationality to triumph over animalistic emotions. ...
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Read MoreWhen Donald Trump excused his lewd, explosive conversation with Billy Bush from 2005 as “locker room talk,” my ears pricked up and not just because the gender wars he’s engendered have been such excellent fodder for a blog titled “The Games Men Play.”
In my forthcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding” (Less Than Three Press, 2017), about a gay, biracial quarterback’s quest for identity, acceptance, success and love in the NFL, I have a couple of locker room moments in which women are discussed and even confronted in a less than respectful manner. ...
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Read MoreCulture vulture that I am, I somehow missed the cultural appropriation wars that have erupted. That’s what you get for going on vacation and unplugging.
First, novelist Lionel Shriver apparently set off a firestorm at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival with a defense of artists using other people’s races, ethnicities, sexualities, etc. in their creations. Then Claudio Gatti outed the comfortable Roman translator Anita Raja as the author of the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante novels about the friendship between two poor Neapolitan girls.
Meanwhile, Bristol University cancelled a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida,” because students protested white people playing Egyptians and Ethiopians. ...
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Read MoreWell, this is a first – the F-word, the S-word, the T-word and the P-word in political coverage. It all comes courtesy of the latest Donald Trump revelations – that in a hot-mike conversation with Billy Bush in 2005, Trump admitted to groping women.
I have to admit that I’m inured to his shenanigans by now. There are so many of them that I’ve grown a thick skin. What disturbs me here is not Trump, a lost cause, or the predictable blaming of Bill and Hillary Clinton as philanderer and enabler but the idea that this is just boys-will-be-boys banter. ...
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