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On La Dolce Vita and the Floater in My Eye
It was 1960 and I saw La Dolce Vita for the first time; it was the only movie in my experience in which patrons got up and left their rows. The movie was complex to my mind. I didn’t get it, nor did I understand that Fellini was educating us all in how to see without a straight narrative. I sat through it once more because I was challenged by it; when I had seen it twice I realized how it held together and mostly what it was all about. Since that time audiences are used to discontinuities, rapid editing…
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The Skinny on Sojourner
After writing a book of short stories and a Holocaust fiction, what I write now weighs on me. It reminds me of that writer’s cliche of having to come up to the parity of the first published book; the second novel, I suppose, is a killer. The irony about Sojourner is that it emerged from a short story of about 30 pages and evolved into a 200 page book. I remember finishing it on or about 1980, Yet I threw everything I knew then into the book on a manifest level, revealing on a latent level my own discontent about…
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Untidy Lives, I Say to Myself
February is a bleak month for me. I light a candle for Rochelle, now dead for nine years. On February 11 she would have been 71. On February 15, 1970 we were wed. And on February 14 is St. Valentine’s day, consumer mischief day. So February was a combination of events for us and now I light a candle and remember. I think of Our Town and a bit of dialogue in which 50,000 dinners are mentioned in a couple’s life. February 15 would have been our 39th anniversary. Being young and exuberant, I remember at the marriage license bureau…