More music! The OLLI Fall program at Stony Brook University includes the continuation of our workshop “Classical Music Themes and Variation, Part II.” New Schedule: Mondays 1 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. (room to be announced). Online registration began on July 31 at 12 noon, personal registration on August 31. See the OLLI website for full details.

Topics of the Week

The Featured Essay: “Feel My Pain” tries and fails to understand the extraordinary behavior of some people who are climbing a mountain in France.

Writing Life: “The Incredible Journey” follows the path of an ordinary laptop from China to Long Island.

Two (almost) New Books

Not Quite a Stranger: Essays on Life in France is a collection of more or less humorous pieces recording my many visits to that beautiful and baffling country over a period of fifty years.

Lucky Man is the non-memoir that replaced the memoir I had originally intended to write, and am writing now. Various fragments of my life – mostly essays and miscellaneous non-fiction – had been accumulating like Radon gas in the basement for many decades. These I arranged into thematic sections on learning, teaching, working, travelling and so on, in a kind of biographical tapas that the curious reader can dip into at any point, according to taste.

Forthcoming from Permanent Press: another and different memoir, An Unexpected Life.

More details at Amazon.com and on the Books and Audio page of this site.

Podcasts:

All my broadcasts are now available as podcasts on iTunes and Google. Just enter my name in the Search box.