tuesday march 11
Anyone who grew up – as I did – devouring any and all horse-related books, from Marguerite Henry’s
Misty of Chincoteague and Bonnie Bryant’s
The Saddle Club to Walter Farley’s
The Black Stallion series and Mary O’Hara’s
My Friend Flicka, will recognize themselves in the opening passage of Susan Juby's
Another Kind of Cowboy:
In the beginning…
There was Del Magnifico le Noir. If you didn’t know better, you might have mistaken him for a dark-blue Norco bike, but to six-year-old Alex Ford, Magnifico was a three-year-old Thoroughbred, reminiscent of the Black Stallion. Like the Black Stallion, Magnifico was given to bursts of thrilling speed, which is why Alex kept a red dog leash tied to his handlebars.
Continue Reading…
tuesday october 16
New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey surprised many, including his wife, by his 2004 announcement that he was a "gay American." He left office three months later. It wasn't just that he'd had an affair with Golan Cipel, but that he had hired him to be New Jersey's homeland security advisor--not a tiny job in 2002--although Cipel had no particular credentials. After outcry forced McGreevey to fire Cipel, the governor found him four other jobs, which he didn't keep for long.
Eventually Cipel threatened to sue McGreevey for $50 million on sexual-harassment charges. Dina Matos McGreevey published her memoir of the experience, Silent Partner, a few months after Jim McGreevey published his, The Confession.
Continue Reading…
wednesday july 25
Mark Merlis’s 2003 novel,
Man about Town,
is a low-key but wonderfully resonant story of midlife crisis.
Joe Lingeman is a mid-level advisor on legislative matters to Congress. It’s an interesting job, but not exactly earth-shaking.
He has been in a relationship with his lover, Sam, for fifteen years. Again, comfortable, but the earth doesn’t really move.
Then Sam leaves him. And on the job, he’s suddenly in bed (legislatively speaking) with a homophobic senator who wants to ban Medicare payments to gay AIDS patients. Joe is forced to face the fact that he doesn’t have any of the things he wanted to have by midlife.
And what were those things? He remembers the glimpse of infinite possibilities he got at fourteen, when he came across the photo of a beautiful youth in a swimsuit ad at the back of a suave men’s magazine. It seemed like a window into another world to the naïve, repressed boy he was.
Continue Reading…
tuesday march 27
No “Irish History Month” would be complete without a tribute to the Easter Rising, the 1916 rebellion against Great Britain that failed, but sparked the astonishing victory of the War of Independence (1919-1921). William Butler Yeats, a contemporary, was the first writer to make great literature of the story. His poem “Easter, 1916” commemorates the 16 rebel leaders whose executions roused the country to revolution:
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Among recent literary accounts are two superb novels by award-winning writers: Jamie O'Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (2001) and Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999), which follows the story through the revolution and the subsequent civil war. The approaches of these native Dubliners couldn’t be less similar.
Continue Reading…
