On Reading Proust For Book Club
“On Reading Proust” is a hybrid: except for the incidents at the Y, it is all true. Call it creative non-fiction. Or Proustian.
Our public library sponsors an annual citywide book club called Mission Impossible, so named because only the most impossible-to-read classics are selected. What’s an impossible-to-read classic? One that by reputation is too big, too abstract or too abstruse to comprehend or enjoy. Think Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Or as Mark Twain said, a classic is “a book which people praise and don’t read.” But often these books are wonderfully readable, with the right help, and that is what the library provides in the form of an excellent introductory lecture and subsequent breakout discussion groups led by trained facilitators.
The first year the library made the obvious and preemptive choice: Joyce’s Ulysses. Of the 150 or so people who signed up, about a third actually made it to the end, nine months later. That is a phenomenal batting average as far as I’m concerned, having made it only to page 5. . . .
Review of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and ‘Flight’
Evanston RoundTable, March 14, 2013 There’s a lot that’s troubling about “Zero Dark Thirty,” perhaps the least of which is the controversy – which ultimately embroiled Congress in hearings – about whether its depiction of torture helped bring down Osama Bin Laden. Three U.S. senators complained the movie was “grossly inaccurate” regarding the efficacy of […]
Why We Ride
Letter sent to sponsors after the 500-mile AIDS fundraising bike ride in 2002. There was a small sign above the tent with the jugs of Gatorade and boxes of Power Bars at the first pit stop on Day 3 that read: “Ask a fellow rider why you’re riding 500 miles in 6 days?” It was […]
On the Road
I wrote this shortly after hitchhiking through Europe in the spring of 1968, a wonderful trip that took me from London to Jerusalem and back. That trip is recounted in my memoir, Remember Me, excerpts of which are posted on this site. As I recall, the impetus for this story was suggested to me when I met someone at a youth hostel who was very much like the mysterious traveler described here, though, unlike everything else in the memoir, it is largely imagined.
In 1967 and 1968 I had been living and going to college in London, though really what I had been doing was traveling – throughout England and the continent, to Manchester, East Anglia, Paris, Russia and Warsaw. My draft board and my parents thought I was in college, which was fine, but college for me was the road; it was education enough. After a brief visit home on spring break I returned to London to embark on my most audacious travel plan.
I packed a backpack, took a train to the south coast, and crossed the English Channel on . . .