Sy Safransky

Town Hall: The Downtown Blues

I’m probably the wrong one to eulogize Town Hall. Someone with a taste for the crowds and the suds should be sweeping the ashes, humming all the while.

Unconditional Guarantee

Taking The Worm

Jimmy Carter For President

There’s a bony finger pointed at me, and another, and another. Old spirits, dead but never gone, our living history, the crust we call our past — Dallas, Selma, Chicago, the other meat on the rack — their voices all stink and ridicule, over the chains and the fire: DON’T TRUST THEM, NOT AGAIN.

An Interview With Swami Muktananda

He was only another name, another guru, until I read Sally Kempton’s article in New York Magazine. Sally had written for Esquire a couple of years ago about her liberation as a woman. Now, she was writing about a different kind of liberation.

Seymour Dueless Says

The rain has run me out of the garden where I was trying to catch up on my weeding, and into the house, to this. Another written thing.

Icarus

Introduction

You Eat It

Is there a right way to eat? Is there a wrong way to write about it? I’ll take the second question first. I’ve got an apple in one hand, a pen in the other, and my mouth is moving as fast as my mind. Is this as bad as talking with your mouth full, or is it the boldest kind of personal journalism?

Seymour Dueless Says

Let’s see, travel. I abhor it as a general rule. No, that’s not true. I like to travel. If I were rich I would probably go to Europe. Nowadays, it’s pretty much the trip into town and whether or not the brake job I did myself is going to . . . well.

Off The Road

Studying astronomy, as a child, I was fascinated by the Earth’s movement, its rotation on its axis, its orbit around the sun, its sweep, with the rest of the galaxy, through space. Despite the evidence of my senses, nothing stood still.