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And Other Essays
Author: Michael Cohen
language: en
Publisher: Interactive Publications
Release Date: 2020-08-03
In this essay collection, the sequel to his A Place to Read, Michael Cohen presents the odd idea of the suicide note as a writing project that can be critiqued like any other, describes encounters with illegal border crossers in south Texas, and ponders the sudden popularity of books about atheism. Books are a frequent subject here, and Cohen makes an argument for The Maltese Falcon as the Great American Novel, searches for the perfect, the Platonic, nature handbook, and compares playing golf to reading about it. Reading is, for him, as engrossing a form of experience as any other—say hitchhiking through the Southwest with an old friend, the joys of flying small planes, or the charm of studying ancient Greek while people-watching at the gym, all experiences chronicled here. He looks back at the effect a 1956 collision of two airliners over the Grand Canyon had on him as a kid fond of flying, and how he learned about the joys of good food during a wanderjahr in Europe. Many of these essays begin with a question: whether Americans deserve their reputation for materialism, why we seem to have lost the climate change battle, and whether talking to yourself might really be beneficial. Another frequent topic is how our ideal places cannot avoid being bruised by time. He looks at what happened as the Tucson bars of his college days closed or morphed into very different places. He traces seasonal changes in the desert. He notes what happens to its effect when a giant cross beside I-40 in Texas is joined by equally giant windmills. And he takes a mind’s-eye tour through Paris’s terrace cafés and their literary associations after the 2015 terrorist attack there.
Curious Peach
These poems are "old-fashioned" in the best sense of that term-unabashedly romantic and joyful in their celebration of the natural world. Full of feeling but not the least bit sentimental, this collection offers a welcome contrast to the angst and pessimism that seems to inspire so much contemporary poetry. - Charles Coe - author of Memento Mori
English Made Easy
I have often been frustrated and amused by natives who want to be understood only by the collusive, other natives and thus resort to the use of esoteric expressions the meanings of which are only privy to their people or even group. The most enduring manner to memorialize the truth is to render the language understandable, even if it entails going back to its proper roots. Typical of me, I chose the hardest of them all: English, specifically because its rules have been intentionally overlooked or, in some cases, glossed over in favor of a wider comprehensibility, as happened in plastics, computer science or military jargon. Let me put it this way: if there already is a way to say something well, there is no need to create a new way of saying itto the glaring degradation of the language. The purpose of a language is universal understand of what is said. In the case of the English language, make that what is said, how it is said, how it is written and even how it is pronounced. It is pointless for English-speaking people to wrongly interpret the intent of another of their kind or to answer in an equally obfuscating fashion. If I say something, I want to be universally understood in as clear a manner as possible!