
RETRO: My Lives with Salinger
Everything Holden says about missing and loving his dead brother Allie, and his kid sister Phoebe, stirs me up. His distress about school, parents, girls, sex, adults, and “phonies” registers with me. Pernnially.
M.J. Moore is Honeysuckle Magazine’s RETRO columnist. He’s the author of Mario Puzo ~ An American Writer’s Quest, and For Paris ~ with Love & Squalor (A Novel).
Everything Holden says about missing and loving his dead brother Allie, and his kid sister Phoebe, stirs me up. His distress about school, parents, girls, sex, adults, and “phonies” registers with me. Pernnially.
One thing led to another. I kept reading and my spirit soared as Malcolm X’s vivid recollections of the Roseland Ballroom in Boston in the 1940s echoed off the pages.
In Memory of Kevin Gerard Fabish (1956-2019) When I was in the 7th Grade and...
Although many other chronicles have reduced these decades to the cliched dichotomy of “conformist” vs. “radical” or “square” vs. “hip,” Dickstein’s restrained, modest, and tasteful memoir offers the middle way.
From investment advisors to avid smokers, weed is thriving as we ring in 2020.
Both memoirs anatomize how high hopes and manifest efforts in the right direction somehow all came crashing down.
The Great Society programs served one purpose: to help Americans from all backgrounds enjoy greater opportunities and a better quality of life.
By M. J. Moore In his short story “Just Like the Girl” (with its sardonic epigram being a line from an old 1890s ditty: “I want a girl, just like the girl that married dear old dad . . .”), author James Jone [https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Jones]s dramatized a deeply upsetting series of incidents that...
Fifty years after Jack Kerouac [https://www.biography.com/writer/jack-kerouac]‘s death on October 21, 1969, a question arises. Should Kerouac be aligned with WWII-era male American authors like James Jones (“From Here to Eternity”), Norman Mailer (“The Naked and the Dead”), and Joseph Heller (“Catch-22”)? Ask around. You’ll be looked at like...
Decades ago, the Berklee College of Music in Boston [https://www.berklee.edu/] was commonly known as “the Jazz School” or some other iteration of a Jazz Institute. More recently, it has been a haven for serious students of all styles – Pop, Rock, Fusion, Funk, Hip Hop and every imaginable kind of Latin Music inflection....
"The man I kept alive... [was] the “alleged” head of the New England Mafia..."
Mario Puzo [http://www.mariopuzo.com/] died twenty years ago this summer. As a novelist, he remains fixed in the public’s mind for one paramount reason: The Godfather [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/290370/the-godfather-by-mario-puzo-with-a-new-introduction-by-francis-ford-coppola-a-note-from-anthony-puzo-and-an-afterword-by-robert-j-thompson/9780451205766/readers-guide/] . Michael Corleone’s tormented transformation. Sonny’s temper. Fredo’s fecklessness. The horse’s head scene an...
Madison Square Garden. August 1, 1971. Against all odds, you scored a ticket to a concert steeped in legend and mystique. Initially advertised as a benefit concert featuring George Harrison & Friends, it’s now being called the Concert for Bangladesh [https://hshoneypot.com/pride-in-cannabis-featuring-breezy-diabo-kait-caridi-amp-aidan-mcgovern/] . And because it’s helmed by ex-Beatle George Harrison, now at...
Ringo’s gift was to bring to the band a richly textured “feel” in his playing that was musically–and temperamentally–ideal.