My Hypochondria

An essay I call "My Hypochondria" has just come out in the Winter 2011 issue of Able Muse Review. An online version is available at http://www.ablemuse.com/v12/essay/michael-cohen/my-hypochondria

Always a Bridesmaid

My essay, "On Not Being E. B. White," which appeared in Kenyon Review a year ago, has been chosen by Robert Atwan for his list of "Notable Essays of 2010." This list is printed at the end of each volume of Best American Essays for that year, and indicates the essays that were considered for inclusion but didn't quite make it. This has happened to me before, with "Location, Location, Location," which was published in The Briar Cliff Review in 2006. One of these years....

The Speed Map

The speed of traffic and the dynamic feel differs across the States. As you move outward from the center of the country, traffic speeds up in the cities. Traffic is faster in Nashville than in Memphis, and as you move east from Tennessee into North Carolina or from Ohio into Pennsylvania, you are precipitated into the great frenetic Brownian motion of The East. It’s a peculiar business, but speed is a different matter in the I-95 corridor of the eastern states from the speed on Los Angeles freeways or on any roads in the wide-open spaces of the southwest.

In the west drivers change lanes purposefully: they want to exit or they enter the express lane to move ahead. In the east the pace is as fast but without order. The concept of an express or passing lane seems unknown, and it is all futile speed and lane-changing, chaotic motion.

Elegy

A poem in Eavan Boland’s, Outside History, “On the Gift of The Birds of America by John James Audubon,” begins “What you have given me is, of course, elegy.” When I read it I thought immediately of my wife Katharine’s telling me about her reading of old bird guides. Even one published as recently as fifteen years ago is already a sad reminder of the past, she said, because it describes a world that no longer exists—the size of flocks, the range of birds, and even some individual species. With Audubon’s Birds the world elegized is more than a century and a half in the past. Elegy, writes Boland in this poem, is “the celebration of an element/which absence has revealed,” where “the pine siskin and the wren are an inference,” along with the hawk and the tern, of the rest of the past these colored drawings elegize.

Surprise

The head of the Pima County Republican party expressed surprise today that anyone would be upset that his party was raising money by raffling off a Glock 23, an updated version of the pistol Jared Loughner used eight months ago to shoot Gabrielle Giffords, Congresswoman from this same district, and to kill six other people.

Dan's Licks

Matt tells the story about when Dan was learning to play the guitar, when Dan was about thirteen and Matt was sixteen. Dan would play the guitar in the mornings before school and pick it up as soon as he got home, playing sometimes late into the night. Matt remembers lying in bed one night when Dan was trying to get an Eric Clapton riff down, it may have been from one of the Cream albums. Dan would play a tape of the riff and then try to play it himself. Matt said, “I heard the Clapton tape, then I heard Dan, then I heard the Clapton tape, then I heard Dan, then I heard the Clapton tape, then I heard the Clapton tape, then I heard the Clapton tape…and I knew he’d got it and we could both go to sleep.”

New Work

Recently out are four essays of mine: “Men in Uniform” in Monkey Puzzle #9 (Spring/Summer 2010), pages 51-55, “Meat and 3 Veg” in New Madrid (Summer 2010), 114-117, “On Not Being E. B. White” in The Kenyon Review (Fall 2010), 86-92, and “A Fountain Pen of Good Repute,” in New England Review (31:4, Winter 2010-2011), 176-180. Also, though dated 2009, this just appeared this summer: “On the Road Again,” North Dakota Quarterly (Summer 2009), 80-89.

The Henry James Subject

I'm in the middle of What Maisie Knew. Finally I've realized what the James subject really is. It's invariably the difference between what is really going on and what a person of limited consciousness thinks is going on--whether that person is a very young girl, a complete egotist, an overexcited governess, or just any American.

Fire in the Sky

Both Timothy Ferris, in Seeing in the Dark and Bob Berman, in his 1995 Secrets of the Night Sky mention the fireball that was visible from nine states the evening of October 9, 1992. Ferris gets the year wrong: he has it as 1993. I remember because Matt and I saw it and I wrote about it in my travel journal; I was visiting Matt in Oberlin when he was working for the Elyria paper the year after he graduated. He was covering a high school game in Wellington. I went with him, and we sat in the only bleachers on the field, facing east. The whole crowd saw the fireball, which hung in the sky for at least fifteen seconds. Was that the beginning of my skywatching? I remember Kathy and I looked at Comet Kohoutek from the Jackson Street house in Tucson in 1976. Early in our time in the Blood River house (we still had the Chevy Malibu that we took from Tucson to New Orleans and then brought to Murray) we all watched a total eclipse of the moon from our driveway—some of us sitting on the hood of the Malibu—so it must have been a spring or summer night. I remember imaging a partial solar eclipse with two cards in the stairwell of Faculty Hall some years ago. So when did this interest begin? I don’t remember wishing I had a good telescope, and even after Kathy gave me the Meade for my birthday in ’99 it took months before I even tried seriously to use it. These thoughts I was turning over on the last day of January in 2003, when I had become seriously interested in amateur astronomy, and had just bought my fourth telescope. The next day at nine in the morning the first space shuttle, Columbia, burned up in reentry from the 107^th shuttle mission, its 28^th.