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Ben Demott and Gloria LaBarbera

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  My mother, Gloria LaBarbera who died recently, and the writer and cultural commentator Ben Demott forged an affectionate friendship over many years-. The relationship was largely epistolary as they grew older,  though very personal as children walking to Hewitt school from the Nottingham area. I was very proud of the relationship--my mother knew quality, and intellectually, Demott was about the best Rockville Centre has put out, esteemed as a cultural contributor and one of the most respected public intellectuals of his day.  Now gone, my mother at age 99 and Demott at age 81, some 18 years ago, since they were contemporaneous, I am able to write about them more intimately than I would have during either of ther lifetimes. I also have inherited many letters from Demott, as well as some other luminaries. In any case, the friendship sparked about 1929, even though Demott did not exude immense charisma during his gradeschool days. While others strove to show athletic prowe...
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rereading "Cold Little Bird" by Ben Marcus"

Ben Marcus' short story Cold Little Bird  appeared in New Yorker  magazine in 2015. I was taken by the quality of the writing and nature of the characters he described. Ben Marcus whose work is both mordant and funny, both experimental and conventional, as this story, one of his more accessible. It is taut and compact, complex and scary. The story is of a preadolescent boy named Jonah and his parents. Jonah suddenly, so it seems, withdraws and rejects his parents. Withdrawn, he becomes the titular "cold little bird". Once a sweet, doted upon child he now is distant, caustic and oppositional. Parents see a change while to everyone else in his life, he is the same sweet boy. Mercilessly, he blocks any attempt to communicate Finally, almost sadistically and rather creatively, he reads anti-Semitic literature, that he knows his father will find outrageously objectionable. Of course it is just the thing that would drive his father to fury. Mother takes on a concerned but just...
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