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Self-Grandiosity, and Other Things
In perusing my name on Google I came across a letter written by one of my former students in the 10th grade advanced class, Jason Levine. The New York Times published it, among other letters to the editor, after I kicked up a dust devil in the community. In an earlier blog I mentioned that I taught English — and also administered an alternative high school — in Dix Hills, a suburban school on Long Island, which I usually referred to as the hills of Dix. I wrote two letters to the editor of the New York Times which were extended essays about…
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Extracts
The complete interview can be found by going to Subtle Tea under links. Look for it under the magazine’s archives. And to get an idea of how David writes, see his review of The i Tetralogy.
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Forever Pregnant
When I was teaching 10th grade English in a nouveau riche Long Island suburb, while I was going for a degree in social work and then a three year certificate in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and writing for me in study halls, late at night and Saturdays, I did not grasp the energy expended as I was driven to succeed — intellectually. I have never been driven by the holy dollar, a defense against the feeling that I could not cut it in business, a legacy of watching my father being a failure in most everything he did. Success for me was…
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I’m Looking out my Window and at This moment
When I read recent reviews of Down to a Sunless Sea I feel not a few of them are so skewed that I cannot imagine what is going on in the reviewers’ minds. “Mortise and Tenon” which is essentially about a controlled and repressed young boy now leads a reviewer to say that he may turn out to be a serial killer.One reviewer repeatedly used “anal” and “oral” in a bizarre interpretation of “Herbie” that I felt subliminally she was competing with me as a therapist. A lousy shrink uses those words with a client. If you wish to see a…