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. [...]
Threes, the Third, at Bennington College
January 25, 2010 by Joseph Kaufman
Filed under Joseph Kaufman, author platform, new author
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 [...]
Growing Beyond, From the Diary of Joseph Kaufman
January 14, 2010 by Joseph Kaufman
Filed under Joseph Kaufman, author platform, new author
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 [...]
Memories of Mr. Benson
January 10, 2010 by Joseph Kaufman
Filed under Joseph Kaufman, author platform, new author
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. [...]
Early Literary Influences
October 20, 2009 by Guest Author
Filed under Joseph Kaufman, Uncategorized, new author
(by Joseph Kaufman)
The Pittsfield, Massachusetts of the sixties that I grew up in was a blue-collar enclave of Catholics and Protestants. It was hardly a literary hotbed though Normal Mailer lived for a while in Stockbridge and William Shirer in Lenox. Historically, in the late nineteenth century, Hawthorne and Melville resided collegially in the Berkshires, [...]
Joseph Kaufman “Roots”
October 7, 2009 by Guest Author
Filed under Joseph Kaufman, new author
My sisters would wear their best dress coats and I would brush my hair and wear a tie when my mother’s parents, wealthy Jews from the City, neighbors of Marlene Dietrich on east 52nd street, sent a limousine to Pittsfield to gather us up. We were the country bumpkins of the family, exiled to the [...]