How We Lived on It (37) – “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”

I was explaining to a friend the other day why I think James Agee to be, if not a great writer, a writer of great distinction. While Agee’s life was too short (he died at 45) to provide the scope necessary for considerations of greatness, he certainly possessed the sheer talent – the prose chops. […]

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 […]