This may be the road to compromise we must all follow: the ancient privilege of a small class and the endless cheerful protest of the mass of those who have less-at least in our eyes,the disadvantaged.
Blog Posts about Travel
Hearing The News
For my “Doris,” a home at the university her father founded…you will understand my delight and appreciation as well as my humility in the face of the many challenges I will encounter as I being to write.
She’s the Woman Wearing a Red Hat
Our books are expensive and employ language that is rapidly becoming obsolete. They are sold in bookstores, which are themselves, special, separate, threatened, and rare.
Moulded By New York City?
The city has a way of enforcing its rules on the unwary that even the Wall Street protesters might find oppressive: a way of dressing that implies a way of being, a way of talking that depends on a certain kind of conformity—the reason, in addition to the expense of living here, that writers and artists get out.
Dorothy Parker, the Volney Hotel, New York in the 1960’s, and Me
When I started out as a writer in the 1960’s, I had to go to New York. There was no alternative. Even Boston, where I lived for a few years after college, and which had an old literary tradition, wouldn’t do; the real publishers, agents, bookstores and readers were—they had to be!—in New York. I had no idea, really, what New York was like; I’d never lived there; and I couldn’t have predicted how hostile the environment would be to me.
After A While In Cities…
There is nothing wrong with cities. They are occasionally beautiful, always stimulating, and as my beloved daughter-in-law, Camila, said as we were walking back last night, everyone feels at home in them—or at least in New York.
The Southwest Chief, Chicago to Lamy, NM November 15, 2010
The sun has set, leaving a rapidly fading orange sky in the west when we pull into Mendota, Illinois on our way west…
Lake Shore Limited, Penn Station to Union Station, Chicago, November 14, 2010
On the train, I reclaim my original identity, to discover, visually, at least, a part of the U.S. I have never known.