. Patricia Hampl’s fine essay in the spring The American Scholar, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Essays From the Edge, surveys the background to Fitzgerald‘s “The Crack Up” essays, published in Esquire in 1936. She finds in the controversial product of Fitzgerald’s attempt to write himself back from personal and authorial oblivion a meeting point in consciousness between poetry and […]
Blink, part IV
Blink I: In My Bedroom ….. Blink II: In Far Rockaway ….. Blink III: In the World IV. In My Mind To be alive and human is to be shadowed by death. “They give birth astride of a grave,” says Becket’s Ponzo in Waiting for Godot, “the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once […]
Blink, part III
In the World It would be an obvious conclusion to draw that I was now finished with both Kenny and Robert as friends, but that would be only half true. It might, as well, more tightly shape my theme to be done with Robert here, but that also would be only half true. Robert talked […]
Blink, part II
In Far Rockaway Shortly before my tenth birthday, we moved from Bell Park Manor-Terrace and that childhood bedroom to an apartment building on Beach Channel Drive in Far Rockaway, also in Queens. Far Rockaway was a tougher and more heterogeneous neighborhood than the predominately white and Jewish Queens Village, and I was confronted with some […]
Blink
In My Bedroom One of my early childhood memories – I might have been four or six or eight, I don’t know, but certainly no older than eight; I think younger – is of lying in bed, alone in the dark, thinking about death. (I was a scream at the birthday parties.) I say alone […]