Friday, July 30th, 2010

Angst (from the diary of Joseph Kaufman)

March 3, 2010 by Joseph Kaufman  
Filed under Joseph Kaufman

It is difficult to describe the degree and nature of tension which aggravates the fault line between being a religious man and writer of fiction. Call it a type of existential strife, a goading and constant friction, a frustrating and at times debilitating clash, which leaves neither of these sides of me alone or unharmed. [...]

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More Memories of Bernard Malamud

February 11, 2010 by Joseph Kaufman  
Filed under Joseph Kaufman

As a senior at Bennington College, I fumbled around for a post-graduation plan which would allow me to write. I observed Mr. Malamud closely then, as if to construct some tableau of sustaining memory of what a real writer looked and acted like before being condemned to real-life writing wilderness: his narrow, almost Arab moustache, [...]

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Threes, the Third, at Bennington College

From the Diary of Joseph Kaufman.
It was at Bennington College, formerly an all-woman’s school gone co-ed seven years previous–450 women and 150 men at the time of my attendance–that I met my third great writing teacher, Nick Delbanco, and my third great friend, Marc Falcone. Bennington dorms were two-story, white New England clapboard houses abutting [...]

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Growing Beyond, From the Diary of Joseph Kaufman

After Mr. Benson, my 9th grade Marine writing teacher, I had no writing teacher for the rest of high school—there simply were no creative writing classes at Pittsfield High School from 1970-1973. Rather, in English class, we read Dickens and Twain and Hawthorne and wrote ten page papers about their significance—I don’t even think I [...]

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Memories of Mr. Benson

My first writing teacher was Mr. Benson, a former Marine, at Theodore Herbert Middle School in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Mr. Benson had a high forehead and crew-cut hair, plus a good selection of striped, club ties. He wore starched, button-down shirts of various yuppie shades, West Point-creased trousers, and wing-tip shoes. [...]

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Reminiscing about Mr. Malamud

(by Joseph Kaufman)
From sleeting March rain to the humid, late-May sun, Mr. Malamud taught his one class a year, ten sessions in all. Some years he taught a course in the short story, replete with reading list and papers to write; other years he taught a writing seminar, the semester’s goal of which was to [...]

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