Send Me A Letter

Come down here and be my house monk. Course you can’t do that. Kids and all. And I am so much older than I used to be. I no longer look or feel very foxy, although god knows of course that I am a good-looking woman. Some things never change. I was watching Otis Redding at Monterey Pop, a time seemed to last forever, then. I don’t think I could bear to watch it if I didn’t, in some far corner of my dreams, think it could all happen again. Or never ended. Right, and Otis is not dead. He was twenty-five at the time of those incredible recordings. Twenty-five and bursting with a talent it’s hard to account for, with soul and good looks. Good moves. What if someone like that had lived?

Just Shoot Me

Is this my first Shoot Me of the year? If so, it’s mighty late in coming. Though this one’s joyous, even funny: I am head over heels with Adam Gopnik, with his piece on Dan Brown— and think no one need ever bother to write again. To wit—in every sense of the word—

The clichés line up outside the dust jacket and are whisked in pairs to a table down front …

Couldn’t you just die? Of course The New Yorker always did have the funniest writers around.  It’s just that Gopnik’s talent seems somehow … unnecessary. Do we really need such wit and seriousness and, above all, profligacy?

I hardly think so.