The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, and “an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture,” has announced the five recipients of Ruth Lilly Fellowships for 2011. My son, Theodore Zachary Cotler, was one of the winners. Quoting from the Poetry Foundations’s website: The editors of Poetry magazine selected [...]
Category Archives: Family
Shoe Polish and History…Repeating
July 14, 2011 – 12:43 am
A guest post by my oldest child, Emily. * * * * * I had this memory of my father. I was very young, and he was shining shoes. I well-remembered the smell, and the mess, and how careful he was with the polish in the little tubs. Everything was kept in a shoebox, and [...]
No Sunglasses, No Service
May 23, 2011 – 12:30 am
I know a woman (she shall remain nameless) who loses her sunglasses repeatedly. A retired attorney, she is neither careless nor insouciant. It just happens. And each time her cheaters go AWOL, she reacts with dismay and a bit of self-directed anger. Then, after a mourning period shortened imperatively by the next glary day, her [...]
Henry VIII for a Five-Year-Old
April 7, 2011 – 9:54 pm
One of my daughters, a medieval history scholar and expert on European royalty, recently acquired a Henry VIII mug with images of his six wives surrounding him. Appropriately, when the Queens get into hot water (e.g., tea or coffee), their heads disappear. What she hadn’t anticipated was how fascinated her five-year-old daughter would be with [...]
A Siyuntist’s Perspective
February 25, 2011 – 5:42 pm
Little Johnny can read well long before he can spell well. Should you be worried? Should you send him to a tutor? Problem-solving technique can be deductive/analytical or inductive/synthetic. Stated another way, an approach can be convergent or divergent. For every youngster striving for literacy, learning to read and spell requires both convergent and divergent
Dog Gone
October 29, 2010 – 1:39 pm
My daughter recently put her 13-year-old cat down. Her post about it was heartfelt and touching. Today Lee Geiger, a chum from my Wall Street days, wrote about saying farewell to his dog. I reprint his goodbye below. * * * * * This is not a good day. The Fat Guy is driving me [...]
A House Cat Murdered My Wife…That’s My Story
May 24, 2009 – 5:19 pm
Treswick was a big cat, a bad cat. He was, his owners averred, tres wicked. It was 1967. I was a first-year graduate student living in Peabody Terrace, the married students’ housing, a walking bridge across the river from Harvard Business School. These were tall, narrow buildings, four units to a floor, all sharing a [...]
The Future of Book Marketing?
May 8, 2009 – 4:30 pm
Movies have previews. Why not books? Yesterday, the Avon Books division of HarperCollins Publishers released a short promo video for Julia Quinn‘s soon-to-be-released novel, What Happens in London. The promo is so professionally done, I would probably have commented on it even if best-selling novelist Quinn (her last book hit #1 on The New York [...]
A Boy, a Swimming Pool, and the Laws of Universe
March 31, 2009 – 9:12 am
My brother Doug writes about his afternoon with my four-year-old grandson: When Ethan and I walked outside, we had no specific plans. We knew only that the sun was shining, the spring birds were singing. It was warm and we were going to explore the backyard. There were so many possibilities. But once he saw [...]
Un-Racism: You Have to Be Carefully Taught
January 22, 2009 – 5:21 pm
James Michener‘s short story collection, Tales of the South Pacific, a bestselling Pulitzer Prize winner in 1948, was eclipsed a year later by South Pacific, the blockbuster Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein musical that includes some of the most memorable songs written for the stage. One song, “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught,” includes this verse: You’ve [...]
