Activity

LAPHAM: Maybe I'd try to tell the wonderful story of Robert Benchley, who was given an examination at Harvard when he was in law school. He hadn't been to a single class in his entire year and was asked to discuss the fishing rights off the Grand Bank from the point of view of the French, the Briti…

JOHNSON: There was a horrible piece I wrote in 1968 praising the student revolution. I'd gone to Paris to cover the Vietnam talks and then in the middle of this the students exploded, for no reason at all, and this became the story. Everyone forgot about Vietnam. It was very exciting, of course, an…

[...] The newspaper column is too finished, too regular; it is an easily digested piece. The essay of the kind that I have long enjoyed reading-as perfected by, say, Montaigne, Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Orwell or E.B. White-has all but disappeared from modern English. Anyone with an argument of more t…

Commencement

They're calling old people seniors
short for senior citizens but it's as though
they're still in college and can look forward
to graduate school at Purgatory State
or the University of the Damned and
I can see this poem is intent on being Catholic
though it started out agno…

After eating, Chester would, as a rule, spend twenty minutes contemplating his own unhappiness, its nature and its depth. This was like dropping a stone into an old quarry and waiting for the eventual splash, except every year the wait was longer, and while he waited the empty sound of loneliness s…