Stories by Joseph Epstein
How Cool Was That?
Not especially, in retrospect.
May 22, 2017
I don't blow but I'm a fan. Look at me swing, ring-a-ding-ding. I even call my girlfriend 'man.' . . . Every Saturday night with my suit Buttoned tight and my suedes on I'm getting my kicks digging arty French Flicks with my shades on. —"I'm Hip" lyrics by Dave Frishberg The first distinction required in treating Joel Dinerstein's exhaustive—and slightly ex-hausting—book is that between hip and cool. To be cool is, in Dinerstein's words, "associated with detached composure as we Read more
Do Culture and Politics Mix?
Joseph Epstein on cultured politicians.
May 15, 2017
In Aristophanes' play The Knights , I came upon the following sentence, spoken by the Greek general Demosthenes to a sausage-seller whom the gods have prophesied will become the next leader of Athens: "No, political leadership's no longer a job for a man of education and good character, but for the ignorant and disgusting." For some years I have thought that there isn't a single member of Congress I'd care to meet for a cup of coffee. The last politician whom I did care to meet was Daniel Pat Read more
Money Talks--in My Case Softly
Joseph Epstein joins the donor class.
Apr 03, 2017
I'm about to do something that my eminently sensible father would have disapproved of: write a check to a politician. True, it is to be a small check, one for only $200, but its recipient, the alderwoman of the first ward in Evanston, Illinois, my ward, seems to me an exceptional person. Still, however small the domain of her activity, a politician she (Judy Fiske is her name) remains, and I was brought up to believe that you do not give money to politicians, unless, that is, you wish to own the Read more
There’s a Waiter in My Soup
Joseph Epstein has a tip for the waiters.
Mar 27, 2017
Last evening, at a neighborhood restaurant, I had a splendid meal, and not the least splendid thing about it was our waiter. He efficiently answered questions about the menu. He refilled our wine glasses at precisely the right moment. He paced delivery of courses—drinks, salad, entree, coffee—at the perfect length. He was cordial without lapsing into familiarity. Middle-aged, knowledgeable about the dishes on offer, reserved, he never came to the table to ask if everything was all right, having Read more
The Cultured Life
And why it is worth pursuing
Mar 20, 2017
During my teaching days, along with courses on Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather, I taught an undergraduate course called Advanced Prose Style. What it was advanced over was never made clear, but each year the course was attended by 15 or so would-be—or, as we should say today, wannabe—novelists and poets. Usage, diction, syntax, rhythm, metaphor, irony were some of the subjects taken up in class. Around the sixth week of the eight-week term I passed out a list of 12 or so names and h Read more
First-Name Basis
Joseph Epstein (that's Mr. Epstein to you)
Jan 16, 2017
I recently sent an email to the editor of the London Times Literary Supplement complaining about his running a longish lead article by a lunatic-of-one-idea feminist who would cite misogyny as the explanation for the behavior of Lady Macbeth, Lucretia Borgia, and the Wicked Witch of the West. He provided a kindly, if not in the least convincing, defense in a reply that began by his addressing me by my first name. Thirty or so years ago I had a correspondence with an earlier editor of the TL Read more
Hitting Eighty
Life comes at you fast
Jan 02, 2017
Not to be born is best, when all is reckoned, But when a man has seen the light of day The next best thing by far is to go back Where he came from, and as quick as he can. Once youth is past, with all its follies, Every affliction comes on him, Envy, confrontation, conflict, battle, blood, And last of all, old age lies in wait to besiege him, Humiliated, cantankerous, Friendless, sick and weak, Worst evil of all. — Oedipus at Colonus , Sophocles (tran Read more
A Rage to Write
John O'Hara, social chronicler.
Dec 12, 2016
John O'Hara was wont to complain publicly about the state of his reputation, thereby joining the majority of writers, most of whom keep this standard complaint to themselves. What, exactly, apart from being insufficiently grand to please him, was his reputation? I should say it was—and remains today—that of a writer a substantial notch below Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, about all of whom he spoke and wrote reverently. Five or so years younger than these three no Read more
Joy in Mudville as the Cubs Win
From the November 14, 2016, issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
9:50 AM, Nov 04, 2016
Chicago Not the least of the benefits of the Chicago Cubs winning the 2016 World Series is that it figures to put a stop to all the tosh written and talked for decades now about the team as lovable losers. On the eve of the Cubs' return to Wrigley Field after the second game of the series, a local newsbroadcaster, a woman named Cheryl Burton, striking the characteristic note of nauseating sentimentality associated with the Cubs, remarked, "The journey is about more than baseball." I found myse Read more
Joy in Mudville
A fair-weather fan's notes
Nov 14, 2016
Chicago Not the least of the benefits of the Chicago Cubs winning the 2016 World Series is that it figures to put a stop to all the tosh written and talked for decades now about the team as lovable losers. On the eve of the Cubs’ return to Wrigley Field after the second game of the series, a local newsbroadcaster, a woman named Cheryl Burton, striking the characteristic note of nauseating sentimentality associated with the Cubs, remarked, "The journey is about more than baseball." I found myse Read more
Why Visiting PetSmart is the Key to Happiness
From the November 7, 2016, issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
8:52 AM, Nov 03, 2016
Perhaps the last place in America to see normal people is at PetSmart, the large national chain selling birds, guinea pigs, mice, turtles, lizards, and supplies for these and just about every other animal, excluding elephants, otters, walruses, panthers, and perhaps a few others. Where else can one go to get a haircut for one's dog, toys for one's cat, a small jar of crickets for one's iguana? Not the least interesting fauna to be found on the premises, though, are the store's customers, all of Read more
Incorruptible, Uncritical Devotion
Joseph Epstein, pet smart.
Nov 07, 2016
Perhaps the last place in America to see normal people is at PetSmart, the large national chain selling birds, guinea pigs, mice, turtles, lizards, and supplies for these and just about every other animal, excluding elephants, otters, walruses, panthers, and perhaps a few others. Where else can one go to get a haircut for one’s dog, toys for one's cat, a small jar of crickets for one's iguana? Not the least interesting fauna to be found on the premises, though, are the store's customers, all of Read more
The New Not-Normal
A Casual from the September 12, 2016, issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
7:30 AM, Sep 09, 2016
Contemporary English is proficient at tossing up new words or phrases—"vogue words," H. W. Fowler called them, in his classic Modern English Usage —that convey less meaning than they seem to but that nonetheless apparently charm the multitudes who use them. Off tongues they come not so much tripping as slurring. Tipping point, outlier, iconic, meme, and more, the job of such words and phrases is to contort precision and, at no extra charge, distort reality. Confronted with the latest of these p Read more
The New Not-Normal
Joseph Epstein's modern English usage.
Sep 12, 2016
Contemporary English is proficient at tossing up new words or phrases—"vogue words," H. W. Fowler called them, in his classic Modern English Usage —that convey less meaning than they seem to but that nonetheless apparently charm the multitudes who use them. Off tongues they come not so much tripping as slurring. Tipping point, outlier, iconic, meme, and more, the job of such words and phrases is to contort precision and, at no extra charge, distort reality. Confronted with the latest of these p Read more
Unblinking Eye
The infinite rewards of immersion in Proust.
Aug 08, 2016
In a contest for the best novels of the past four centuries, the winners, surely, are: for the 17th century, Don Quixote ; for the 18th century, Tom Jones ; for the 19th, War and Peace ; and for the 20th, Remembrance of Things Past , or as it is now increasingly known in English, In Search of Lost Time . A Spaniard, an Englishman, a Russian, and a Frenchman—what a motley crew their authors comprise! Cervantes was the son of a barber-surgeon; Fielding was a journalist, a jurist, and scion of Read more
The Sly Pornographer
Joseph Epstein leaves it to your imagination
Jul 18, 2016
At a local library sale, I not long ago picked up for fifty cents a clean copy of The Olympia Reader , an anthology from the Paris publishing house that in its day printed the best high-class pornography then going. Olympia Press published the Marquis de Sade, John Cleland, Pauline Réage, Frank Harris, Henry Miller, Genet, William Burroughs, and, perhaps most famously, the first edition of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita . The Olympia Reader was a bestseller when first published in 1965. The boo Read more
Some Modest Proposals for Trump's Vice Presidential Pick
Mike Tyson, Noam Chomsky, or Bill O'Reilly?
7:30 AM, Jul 04, 2016
With Donald Trump slipping, if not precipitously yet nonetheless seriously, in the polls, his choice of a vice-presidential candidate looms all the more important. The wrong choice could doom him, the right choice pull him up even, perhaps ahead of Hillary Clinton. As a not altogether disinterested observer, I should like to make some suggestions that I hope the Republican Party's presumptive nominee might find worth pondering. The advantages of Donald Trump's taking on Chris Christie as his r Read more
Everyone Has His Price
Joseph Epstein counts his pennies.
Nov 24, 2014
I just bought a bottle of Waterman’s ink for $11.34, tax included. The bottle contains 50ml, or less than two ounces, of black ink. This makes ink far more expensive than wine, even quite superior wine. I would have complained—or at least exclaimed—about the price, but the man who sold it to me was so pleasant and so knowledgeable about fountain pens that he quite took the whine out of my sails. I can remember when a bottle of ink cost 15 cents. Memories of much lower prices of an earlier da Read more
Not Many Laughs
Joseph Epstein, Jewish Joker
Jun 13, 2016
I recently gave a talk at a synagogue in Miami on the subject of Jewish humor—specifically on the jokes Jews tell about themselves. Freud, in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious , wrote: "I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character [as do the Jews]." Other ethnic and nationality groups tell jokes about themselves, not only currently but throughout history. The classicist Mary Beard, in Laughter in Ancient Rome , Read more
No Need to Read All About It
Joseph Epstein's dullness derby.
Apr 25, 2016
I first acquired a connoisseur’s interest in dull headlines in 1963, when I read, in a note in the air edition of the English New Statesman , that the London Times had staged a contest for the dullest headline to appear in the paper over the past year. The winning entry was "Small Earthquake in Chile, Not Many Dead." Something exquisite about the irrelevance of that headline: an earthquake so far away and one with apparently so little consequence. Every word in it suggests there is no need to Read more
Life Within Lives
Who reads--and who writes--biographies, and why?
Apr 11, 2016
When I come upon an artist, a philosopher, a scientist, a statesman, an athlete I admire, I find myself interested in his or her background, which is to say in their biography, in the hope of discovering what in their past made possible their future eminence. I find it more than a touch difficult to understand anyone so incurious as not to have a similar interest. I have myself written scores of biographical essays, but never a full-blown biography. I once took a publisher’s advance to write Read more
There’s a Flag on That Sentence
Joseph Epstein, couch cop
Feb 08, 2016
My combined roles as television couch potato and language snob have not been easy on me. What I most watch on television is sports and news, with a fair amount of DVDs, these chiefly of English detective stories. Much of this television watching is done in the evening, when, as they say about major-league pitchers who have been hit hard, you can put a fork in me, I'm done. I turn on my television set, in the cant phrases of the day, to kick back, to chill, to knock off for the day. Except I d Read more
Classical Gasbags
A handbook of political catchwords.
Jan 18, 2016
Ronald Syme — actually, Sir Ronald Syme — is not a household name in America, but perhaps it ought to be. Syme (1903-1989) was a New Zealand-born classicist, later an Oxford don, who is in many quarters regarded as the greatest historian of ancient Rome. He wrote a biography of Sallust and a two-volume biography of Tacitus, who, in the time of the emperors, was himself the greatest historian of Rome. With a book called The Roman Revolution (1939), Syme turned round the standard interpretations Read more
Tacitus the Great
How our vision of Rome has been shaped by its chronicler.
Jan 11, 2016
For a man who delved into the lives of others, not all that much is known about the life of Cornelius Tacitus, historian of Rome under the empire. He was born in 56 or 57 a.d. and is thought to have died around 125 a.d. His family came from Narbonensis (the modern Provence), or possibly from Northern Italy, and so he was not Roman by birth. He was what the Romans called a novus homo , or new man. He married the daughter of Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the Roman general, a man of the provincial nobil Read more
Santa Claus Is Coming to Town
Joseph Epstein plays Kris Kringle
Dec 21, 2015
Christmas these days is signaled not by the music played in shops and the wreaths hung along lampposts, but by the increasingly heavy load of catalogues that begin arriving in the mail late in October. Pity the poor mailman, having to lug such stuff around. These catalogues give recycling a bad name. Recycling them, after all, is the surest guarantee that more will arrive. Best, late at night, when the pollution police are long since in bed, to burn them at a disagreeable neighbor's curb. Read more
A Job in the Neighborhood
Joseph Epstein evaluates his teaching.
Nov 23, 2015
I taught at a university for 30 years, from 1973 until 2002. The timing of my departure was exquisite. I left before smartphones became endemic and political correctness, with triggering and microaggressions and the rest, kicked in. The courses I taught—in Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, and in something called Advanced Prose Composition—were all electives, and so my sampling of students may have been less than comprehensive, but I liked the kids who wandered into my classes. Twenty-fi Read more
Whatever Happened to High Culture?
An inquest
Nov 09, 2015
I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even anticipate a period, of some duration, of which it will be possible to say that it will have no culture. Notes Toward the Definition of Culture —T. S. Eliot My friend Hilton Kramer, the art critic of the New York Times and afterwards the founding editor of the New Criterion , was not a man you asked whom he liked in the Super Bowl. An acquaintance once queried me about which was Hil Read more
Remembering Torelli
Joseph Epstein, Torelli Fan
Oct 12, 2015
In 1991 I wrote an essay for the American Scholar called “The Ignorant Man’s Guide to Serious Music,” in which I was both the ignorant man and the guide. The essay was about my love for classical music and my hopeless inability to get beyond the stage of a coarse admiration of it. Midway through the essay I remarked on the vast quantity of great music available from the past, and as an example mentioned a composer I had not hitherto heard of named Giuseppe Torelli (1658-1709). At a concert I h Read more
Tennis, Everyone
One way of seeing Roger Federer’s game.
Sep 14, 2015
In 2008, at the age of 27, Roger Federer had finished his fourth consecutive year as the number-one ranked tennis player in the world, already won 13 Grand Slam tournaments, and made most of his opponents look as if they had come to play against him with a cricket bat instead of a tennis racquet. That year the Onion published a photograph of Federer, on which was listed his strengths and weaknesses. Among his weaknesses was cited “speaks fluent German,” “has weakened knees by falling to them i Read more