Memoir
Les Bises
The Story's About You
The Indignity of Labor
IN 1940, WHEN he was twenty-two years old, Fyodor Mochulsky received his diploma from the Railroad Transport Engineering Institute in Moscow. A promising student and a largely contented Soviet archetype, he was a candidate member of the Communist Party and his speech was made heavy with the cumbersome lingua franca of high Stalinism. After graduation, he readied himself for factory life, or as he put it, “any practical work they had for me in any region of our huge country.” READ MORE >>
The Memory and The Pity
Realism's Return
Outward, and Inward, Bound
A FEW YEARS AGO, when John Casey turned seventy, he marked his birthday by logging that number in self-powered kilometers. Setting out on a pasted-together ramble through neighborhoods near his home in Virginia, Casey’s journey consisted of cycling, rowing on an erg machine, ice-skating, rollerblading, and a final lap around the block walking his dog. Back at home, he sat in his dinning room with a calculator and found that he had cleared the figure with about five kilometers to spare. READ MORE >>
The Singer, Not the Song
I DON’T NEED Harry Belafonte to tell me what it means to be black,” Condoleezza Rice once said in response to Belafonte’s castigation of her and Colin Powell for serving in George W. Bush’s administration. The line registered because of its implication of something a tad kitschy about Belafonte as a public figure, as if the criticism had come from, say, Tony Orlando. READ MORE >>
