Archive - May 29, 2015

A Writer Writes — Breaking Bread with Lindsay Lohan and Obama by Gerald Karey (Turkey 1965–67) • It was Lindsay Lohan’s attendance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner where former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw drew the line. Not at Ozzy Osbourne, Paula Jones, Larry Flint, Donald Trump or, Lord have mercy on us, Kim Kardashian. “The breaking point for me was Lindsay Lohan. She became a big star at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Give me a break,” Brokaw said after the 2013 dinner. “There was more dignity at my daughter’s junior prom than there is [at] what I’m seeing on C-SPAN there.” That may be an unfair comparison. Junior proms set a rather high bar. But cut Lindsay some slack. She may have been better behaved than the room full of liquored-up hacks. Her host, Greta van Susteren, who spins right-wing fables for Fox News, said: “The table . . .

Bartram’s Garden by Eleanor Stanford (Cape Verde 1998–2000) Carnegie Mellon University Press February 2015 82 pages $15.95 (paperback) Reviewed by Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978–79) • As luck and timing would have it, I come to Eleanor Stanford’s Bartram’s Garden just as a seemingly infinite number of Brood XXIII cicadas have emerged from their hidey holes in western Kentucky. I can’t imagine a better book to read to the accompaniment of the music of the spheres, as I keep calling the rattling surround sound produced in the resonant abdomens of the male cicadas clinging to the leaves of every tree, bush, and flower in our neighborhood. The last time I heard it — exactly thirteen years ago, in accordance with the periodicity of Brood XXIII — my children, who are now both almost out of the teenage years, were the same age as Stanford’s young children. If the home is a . . .