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COTTON CANDY
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COTTON CANDY AND KITES Centuries ago I lived in Brighton Beach and then Manhattan Beach, two communities on the south shore of Brooklyn. If you took transit, or the El above Brighton Beach Avenue, you would come to Coney Island, even then a soiled slut of an area. It could serve as a set […]
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AT WHAT COST: PART ONE
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What does a writer do when he is in psychological pain, devastating hurt? Agony is the better name, and suffering is its coverlet. He makes up a song for himself, an air to play over and over again until the pain is extinguished and he is soothed. It is a fabricated ritual to slake the immediacy of the […]
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PLATO’S CAVE, from my memoir
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PLATO’S CAVE In March of 1968 I was sitting in my apartment on Ash Avenue watching a black-and-white TV when President Lyndon Johnson spoke to the American people. I recall vaguely his reiterating that he would not accept a nomination to run for president again and repeated that he would step down at […]
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FROM A NEW MEMOIR: “Naomi”
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ON NAOMI I’m Naomi and this part will be mine as Matt is uncomfortable with it after all these decades because what he did was to blame the victim: me. When I met him I was 24 and in a loose relationship with a pharmacist in Queens. I was gorgeous, no doubt […]