If there is one matter on which I can speak with authority – or at least experience – it is rejection. I started sending stories out for publication fifteen years ago. For a while I kept count of the rejections. After about a hundred, for the purpose of ego maintenance, I decided to stop. Let’s […]
Author Archives: Pete
Phatic Balance
At the recommendation of friends, I watched Horace and Pete. It didn’t do for me what it seemed to do for them, and the best thing about it is, indisputably, Paul Simon’s theme song. The other thing that really made an impression on me was this Garry Shandling quote at the end of one […]
Ode to Billy Joe
Due to a risotto mishap, a few mornings ago I was unable to use my kettle. Well, I could have used it, but I would have had to have first scrubbed it, and I was in no mood for labor. So I walked up to the Target, where there’s a Starbucks. I went in and […]
Rough First Draft
That’s from the January 16, 2020 issue of The Economist. I haven’t seen the current one, but we may be in for quite a year if it mentions limited insurrection.
Hindsight
Yes, there’s always the unexpected, isn’t there? – Major Warden, The Bridge on the River Kwai In February a friend came to visit. I hadn’t seen him in a while. As we caught up over drinks he asked what we were listening to. That’s the Brandenburg Concertos, I told him. To emphasize my sophistication […]
Hello, Goodbye
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. – Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus One of my habits is to look at Wikipedia’s on-this-date page. That’s how I learned of the Arecibo Message. On November 16, 1974, the Arecibo Observatory sent a greeting to the […]
Burying the Lede
John Noble Wilford knew that he was writing one of the most important stories of the century: The first human landing on another world. His article — for the front page of The New York Times on July 21, 1969, needed to begin with a sentence that conveyed the immensity of the moment. And […]
November Surprise
Earlier this year I volunteered for a primary campaign up in New Hampshire. On occasion I’d chat with other volunteers about the state of the race. We were, obviously, all in for our candidate, but we also were – or appeared – able to analyze the race with dispassion. The consensus was that the race […]