Posts by long-admin

DECEMBER 25 Among the architectural jewels here on the Outer Cape is the 1827 First Parish Truro church, high on one of the town’s hilltops, where this year we attended a moving Christmas Eve service.  Into the ecumenical celebration was incorporated a traditional Moravian “love feast” with apple cider and gingersnaps. Consistent with the social…

DECEMBER 26 As the New Year approaches, we’ve had a sudden realization of just how much of the last one was spent binge-watching boxed sets of television series’ DVDs.  An alternate world to day-to-day life, our escapist evenings provided a parallel universe of stresses belonging to wholly imaginary people.This past year we went through The…

AUGUST 31 The forthcoming Paris Review anthology, The Unprofessionals, was just announced with a public relations pitch that sounds pretty good at first but quickly reveals itself to be (as is most PR) fantastically false:  “At a moment when it’s easy to see art as another product—and when writers, especially, are encouraged to think of…

DECEMBER 29 Our New Year’s resolution is this: We’re going to read more real books and spend less time online. Not only are we pretty sure we’re going to be using our fading intellects more effectively, we also announce this intention as a kind of protest to the end of the paper form of The New Republic. …

DECEMBER 30 One of the best presents we received this year for Christmas was the big, thick collection of Malcolm Cowley’s letters, brought out by Harvard University Press and entitledThe Long Voyage. The literary journey was long because the life was long. If the book only provided the backstory to Exile’s Return, the letters would be more than worthwhile,…

DECEMBER 31 Jed Perl  begins his “best” of the year list (online at The New Republic) with Jacques Bonnet’s observation about art books, about how the reproduced images “come one after another or echo one another, all with their cargo of art works.” After Perl recalls some of the year’s most memorable exhibits and catalogues, he quotes…