Every once in a while someone will ask me, “Why don’t you write about Rosanne Cash anymore? And hey, whatever happened with your marriage proposal to her?”
It’s true that I was one of the first (or, anyway, one of the most effusive) to praise her work as a writer—not just as a singer and Read More
Actually, it’s not my very first lesson, it’s my first since my freshman year at Yale when–after five years of Latin–I hit the wall. Gave up, frustrated by the conflict between my awareness of the dazzling, voluptuously seductive beauty of the elegies of Propertius and Tibullus, my awe at the incomparable works of Catullus, which Read More
Of all the aspects of the Monica Lewinsky frenzy, the one I find most fascinating-and irritating-is the misuse, no, the abuse , of the idea of “sophistication.” I’m referring to the way that flourishing the concept of “sophistication” has given an inordinate number of people-some of them perhaps genuinely sophisticated, but most, well, less sophisticated Read More
Self-loathing: You might recall several months ago I wrote a column in praise of self-loathing in the work of Martin Amis, self-loathing as an unacknowledged virtue . In an age where the conventional wisdom is that we all suffer from a lack of self-esteem, it seemed to me that, considering the loathsome nature of human Read More
