by Adam | Friday 20 January 2012
As I may have bragged about a few times before, I'm currently the occupant of W. H. Auden's old apartment in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, Kings County, New York, U.S.A. I've been reading more of him so I can channel his...
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by Adam | Tuesday 29 November 2011
Following my piece in the Atlantic, an old professor of mine (who suffered through some clunky/abstract/overwrought writing of mine on more than one occasion) sent me this essay by Steven Johnson, to remind me that the long search for clarity...
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by Adam | Thursday 24 November 2011
"Let the others write the books. Leave the fate of literature in their good hands and relinquish life alone in your room. It isn’t life and it isn’t you. It’s ten talons clawing at twenty-six letters. Some animal carrying on...
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by Adam | Friday 28 October 2011
As it is well known around the web, TFR is a very fashion forward enterprise. From our sleek design to the measured green fonting, we take matters of style very seriously around here. Accordingly, while reading the Sunday Styles section...
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by Adam | Monday 5 September 2011
Here's a good read in the Paris Review of an interview/dialectical/conversation/seance between Janet Malcolm and Katie Roiphe. Sure it's about writing, but it's also about everything else. Take the time to read it, it's better than what you were doing...
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by Adam | Friday 24 June 2011
Gay Talese wrote this very hypnotic piece about his media diet for the Atlantic. If you don't read the Media Diet series, you're missing out on a lot of really interesting (and oddly repetitive) guides for how and what writers...
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by Adam | Thursday 16 June 2011
I was recently asked to lend my musical "expertise" to help a future mother compile a list of tracks for her gestating child to listen to while both inside and out of the womb. The parameters were classic, but not...
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by Adam | Wednesday 25 May 2011
As the kids get off of school (not mine...I hope), I've been seeing a lot of reposting of commencement addresses. Amy Poehler's speech at Harvard was pretty funny. Tony Kushner had a great one a few years back that I...
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by Adam | Wednesday 27 April 2011
Note: I wrote this about four years ago and I found it tonight when I was digging through some old folders. If I'm to fit this into a journalism peg (or a trust fund reporting peg), it would be the...
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by Adam | Friday 4 March 2011
Every interaction starts to feel like H.S. Thompson at the Derby. Read it and weep....
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by Adam | Tuesday 1 March 2011
I had been in New York long enough to feel suffocated by it; the city was a crowded galaxy suffused with light from dying stars and the clamor of colliding refuse. Here the streets were filled with heaven’s chattel,...
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by Adam | Saturday 26 February 2011
It hadn’t immediately dawned on me that I was supposed to leave the room. Moreover, I didn’t want to. And so, I edged my way over to remember myself to a former professor of mine who was standing beside...
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by Adam | Sunday 23 January 2011
Props to writer and TFR-friend Ilana Garon for thrusting this Brian Greene piece on our previously science-secular writing group. Humbling ideas to think on (even if it came from the Times.) If the dark energy doesn’t degrade over time, then...
Click here to continue reading "Dark Matter and the Like" »
by Adam | Sunday 16 January 2011
No, I did not catch Yefim Bronfman playing the formidable Rach 3 in some European concert hall, but I did see him play Brahms No. 2 at the New York Philharmonic this past weekend at Lincoln Center. If I...
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by Adam | Wednesday 15 December 2010
While I'm at it with the New York Times Book Review, check out this elegant portrait of Saul Bellow in Wieseltier's review of Bellow's recently reviewed book of letters. One marvels for many reasons at the man who wrote these...
Click here to continue reading "Leon Wieseltier on Saul Bellow" »
by Adam | Saturday 11 December 2010
Mark Greif over at n+1 wrote this essay in the Times Book Review a few weeks ago. As one against whom the hipster charge has been oft-leveled, I found it interesting. Accordingly, I've been carrying this article around with me...
Click here to continue reading "The Hipster in the Mirror" »
by Adam | Wednesday 6 October 2010
CBS won't let me embed this video, but if you've got seven minutes, I suggest you watch this endlessly entertaining/extremely uncomfortable Philip Roth interview on CBS Sunday Morning. Most awesome interview ever. In it (and much to the chagrin of...
Click here to continue reading "Nobel Prize in Literature" »
by Adam | Saturday 2 October 2010
Editor’s Note: Be patient with me. I know this is staid (Ridiculous) material, but give me three paragraphs to seduce you. In the weeks ahead of its performance at the New York Philharmonic, I listened to two recordings of...
Click here to continue reading "A Bang and a Whimper" »
by Adam | Thursday 2 September 2010
I owe you two parts Turkey and three parts Dubai. Don't let me off the hook. Unfortunately, I've got more pressing matters right now...like the mini-biographies I'm working on. Here's another bit: My paternal grandfather, who never seemed to smile...
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by Adam | Wednesday 7 July 2010
Agnon's house in Talpiot. It's on an old hill in Jerusalem that overlooks something neither city nor desert. Agnon's house has a space in the back for us to assemble and as we do, we're quoted his Nobel Prize...
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by Adam | Monday 21 June 2010
In advance of my trip to the Middle East (tick tock), my spiritual and literary sensei suggests: Just stick with Naipaul and Kapucinski. Not their attitudes, which you can take or leave, but the way they deal with historical space,...
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by Adam | Monday 17 May 2010
by Adam | Wednesday 12 May 2010
(Late) Last night I wrote this to a friend to whom I'd been a shitty correspondent. Today it feels more honest than I normally allow and so I'm sending it all of you: I'm sorry for being MIA. The spring...
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by Adam | Thursday 25 March 2010
Some storefronts on my new block: Bail bonds (two), attorney's offices (two), French restaurant, science lab for children, paper store, Halal meat shop, printing press, soul food to go, toy store, cooking class kitchen, nail salon, fine arts gallery, Vietnamese...
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by Adam | Monday 22 March 2010
“I grew up a Jew in New York City,” Najla Saïd declares early in her autobiographical one-woman play “Palestine.” Saïd describes herself as a Semitic-looking girl who was raised on the Upper West Side in a politically left-leaning apartment...
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by Adam | Friday 19 March 2010
I'm in the middle of Amos Oz's autobiography which is quickly becoming one of my favorite books. Oz ends an early chapter by asking and answering a question about S.Y. Agnon, a family friend and one of his favorite writers:...
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by Adam | Thursday 11 February 2010
Or to bastardize Voltaire: If this person didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Thanks to TFR reader Jason for sending this (as well as many other things) my way....
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by Adam | Friday 29 January 2010
Let me get this little bit out of the way right now: Louis Menand of The New Yorker wrote the following about "The Catcher in the Rye" ten years ago and I don't think it's been said any better...
Click here to continue reading "Claiming J.D. Salinger (1919-2010)" »
by Adam | Monday 18 January 2010
Perhaps an indulgent exercise considering the tragedy we're all reading about, BUT... for those of you interested in following a controversy that is raging around the literary establishment these days (whatever any of that means), a few weeks ago, Katie...
Click here to continue reading "Naked and the Conflicted" »
by Adam | Wednesday 2 September 2009
Great Smoky Mountains National Park is an American Avalon, a Tennessee paradise. The outskirts of the park, however, are a flailing, tacky Southern waiting room. There is a highway stretch filled with chapels, theme parks, chain restaurants. Dollywood spans...
Click here to continue reading "Fugue State: Assert Your Dominance (Bears)" »
by Adam | Saturday 29 August 2009
Dissociative Fugue Disorder: When a person is in a fugue state, he'll pick up and travel suddenly to some random point, not at all sure why he's doing it, and sometimes with little memory of who he is. This summer...
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by Adam | Monday 20 July 2009
The account of how A Moveable Feast came into being from Hotchner's point-of-view is probably more interesting than the actual controversy itself....
Click here to continue reading "A.E. Hotchner on Hemingway's "new" 'A Moveable Feast'" »
by Adam | Friday 3 July 2009
My first and last foray into writing for young adults. When I was sixteen years old, I boarded a bus from Newark Airport to reach a place I knew only as Starlight, PA. The name itself, Starlight, had magical...
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by Adam | Monday 29 June 2009
While I'm teaching this summer and working on bigger projects, I'll do my best to keep you posted on little things. In the meantime, here's a bit of what I've been working on: I’ve come to stay here more and...
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by Adam | Tuesday 28 April 2009
Despair has always been a currency with which the world of letters trades. This simply is. Despair is amorphous and timeless. Its depth is unmeasurable and its manifestations endless. As a new revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Desire Under the...
Click here to continue reading "Review: Desire Under the Elms" »
by Adam | Monday 9 March 2009
The day started sunny and we weren't looking for trouble, my friend and I went all the way uptown near where he used to live. It was the second nicest day of the year and there was traffic blocking...
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by Adam | Thursday 5 February 2009
There is a beautiful moment in the Bhagavad Gita Arjuna. The general. The great general. He's standing in his chariot. And all the chariots are readied for war. And across the valley, he sees his opponents. And there he sees...
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by Adam | Saturday 20 December 2008
Dear West Elm Marketing Corps: As the Christmas (and, as I understand it, miscellaneous other) holiday hours are nearing, it disappoints me that I’ve yet to hear back from your office regarding the picture entitled “Urban Cocoa,” which I...
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by Adam | Sunday 9 November 2008
Parts II & III of New York Onanism are forthcoming, I went into writer's block after being so pretentious....
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by Adam | Monday 15 September 2008
I telegraph mockingbird laughter back and ask him a last question.
“How are you?”
This is a question of paradox. It is the question of both an acolyte and an equalizer, something you'd ask an immortal mortal and his other, something that would be considered odd as part of any other valediction.
“I’m well,” he says. “Thank you. I’m very well.”
Click here to continue reading "The Novel vs. The State" »
by Adam | Saturday 8 March 2008
Sometimes, my friends interrupt my life to impose imperatives upon me. This has to be, in a lot ways, what friendship is about. The closest of them will demand (as I probably do too often of them) that I stop...
Click here to continue reading "Review: Bon Iver, "For Emma, Forever Ago"" »
by Adam | Wednesday 20 February 2008
Philip Roth has not yet left the building. We will note that Roth, growing more in his later years, has already taken pains to prepare us for the inevitable. His alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman has ushered us through the epic...
Click here to continue reading "Book Review: Exit Ghost by Philip Roth" »
by Adam | Sunday 21 October 2007
Harmless Lies: My College Roommate or The Bar Stool Lie We are at (fill in one-word bar name) and, if I am lucky, I have exactly 45 seconds to make an impression on you (falsely appearing plaintive and momentarily neglected...
Click here to continue reading "The Liars' Club (Damn You Mary Karr)" »
by Adam | Sunday 14 October 2007
I woke up at 7:16 this morning, distressed by the sound of my radiator making its first rounds of the season. It was only white noise but it scared me out of a dream about something I'll never recall. I...
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by Adam | Sunday 26 August 2007
Spoiler Alert: The end of this post contains the first two sentences of my forthcoming book about racist warlocks. Should you be a warlock purist, I strongly urge you not to read the last section of this post. I...
Click here to continue reading "Racist Warlocks and Sunflowers" »
by Adam | Saturday 25 August 2007
A man doesn't have time in his life to have time for everything. He doesn't have seasons enough to have a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes Was wrong about that. | Yehuda Amichai | My house here is covered in...
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by Adam | Monday 13 August 2007
At the risk of offending someone's artistic sensibilities, I took pictures of some of my favorites at the Musee d'Orsay: (I've also put to use my amateur deconstruction and analysis skills to make the art banal for everyone else. Enjoy!)...
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by Adam | Sunday 12 August 2007
Artistic/symbolic blurriness or low battery? You decide. I napped and "worked" until 10:30 on Saturday night, showered and made it to Montmartre at midnight. For those unfamiliar, Montmartre is on the far northern end of Paris (I think), on...
Click here to continue reading "The Montmartre Arcade Fire" »
by Adam | Sunday 12 August 2007
Trying to look as French as possible here. Champs Elysees: Part One One day when I'm traveling dishonestly, I will wake up early (or stay out all night) so that I can walk the Champs Elysees when it's empty...
Click here to continue reading " A Mime, A Beret, and the Champs-Élysées" »
by Adam | Sunday 12 August 2007
Only the French (and Tony Parker) would place this backdrop for a basketball court. Inspired by the stories of French apostasy at the Jewish Museum of Art and History, I decided that I would break all the Shabbas laws...
Click here to continue reading "Croque Madame and Eiffel Power" »
by Adam | Saturday 11 August 2007
I woke in a panic as I had missed free breakfast at the hotel and had overslept to counterbalance the difference between my intended and actual bedtimes. I was due uptown (which is a totally inaccurate but wholly-of-habit term) in...
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by Adam | Thursday 19 July 2007
He was formed half by the ethics of his father and half by the cruelties of war... -Foreword to a Yehuda Amichai anthology. #4 of Amichai's Seven Laments for the War-Dead 4 I came upon an old zoology textbook, Brehm,...
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by Adam | Wednesday 20 June 2007
Craftsmanship has never been a strong suit of mine. I blame it on growing up left-handed and being told to write and engage in sports right-handed (and by extension, I am blaming Texas) as well as a motor skills...
Click here to continue reading "An Awkward Disquisition on My Blackness" »
by Adam | Wednesday 13 June 2007
...I do not speak much French and my exposure to Edith Piaf was initiated by the tribute that seemingly half of my favorite musicians pay to her work, but I went to this movie and it was a car crash on celluloid, a complete fucking disasterous mess, and perfectly emblematic of the life of the Sparrow...
Click here to continue reading "La Vie En Rose" »