Upsmanship Everyone has heard of ‘gamesmanship.’ So too, ‘oneupsmanship.’ Fewer people, unfortunately, know the creator of these terms, or the books that made them famous. The author was Stephen Potter. Potter was born in 1900 and died too young (as everyone, aside from a few well-known politicians, seems to do) at the […]
A Primer on Pronouns After their careers are over, many athletes move to the television or radio studio. There, they apply their often eccentric version of the English language to the job of explaining an off-tackle dive play or a dunk – as if these things are complicated. Well, no one expects […]
Orwell Redux I read somewhere that sales of George Orwell’s 1984 have risen lately – perhaps in response to the federal government’s snooping into the cyber world of American citizens. It’s not at all hard to imagine a tool like the internet being used in a sinister fashion. Orwell’s Big Brother would have killed […]
Hemingway & Woody Allen: An Odd Couple The other night I watched “Midnight in Paris,” Woody Allen’s movie about a time traveler who returns to Paris in the Twenties and runs into all the big name ex-pat artists. It’s a nice idea and one that most any writer wishes were possible, for that period […]
The Good Stuff Every once in a while friends will ask me what I’m reading — or ask me what I like that they might also like. It happens enough that, when I thought about doing a blog, the idea of writing about some of my favorite authors seemed […]