Wherein Frost laughs in the face of a psychic. And pays dearly.

A blunt look at death, family and all the usual pop culture concerns that describe Ben Tanzer’s best work.

It’s 4:35 AM and Jeffrey Pillow is running around the house like a chicken with its head cut off. Ready or not, here she comes!

What do you mean it dries up and falls off?

That title. What were you thinking?

Yeah, the subtitle is really long. I wrote it early one morning after a seasickening deadline bender. I’d just finished the last chapter and was supposed to deliver the manuscript by the time Viking’s offices opened for business. It was already around 8 and I’d been up since 4. The working subtitle was “An Accidental Odyssey,” and I still kind of like that one, but I knew it was too coy, insufficiently expository. No way was I going to get to keep it. So I started playing. And I had in mind these 18th and 19th century shipwreck narratives. They were so popular they constituted a literary genre, Naufragia, from the French for shipwreck. They had subtitles the lengths of paragraphs. You can see for yourself. I quote one in full on page 251. I still wasn’t sure whether Viking would let me keep my own long subtitle, but god bless ‘em, they did.

No. Not the subtitle. The title. What were you thinking? I mean, Moby-Dick is this epic masterpiece, and you, my friend, whatever you are, are no Herman Melville.

It started as a kind of joke. I chose the title before I wrote a single word, which is unusual. Once I committed to it, I had to take the joke seriously. I knew that my voyage had to be a grand one. I often wished that for my first book I’d chosen a smaller project, a nice little monograph of an essay on oh, I don’t know, the pleasures and perils of bicycling in New York. But I love Moby-Dick, love the so-called informational chapters as well as the action sequences. I think most of all I love the dynamics in Melville’s prose, the swells and troughs, the storms and calms, how it mixes the high and the low, the philosophical and the naughty. I used to tell my students to look out for the fart joke in chapter 1, “Loomings,” (hint, it has to do with the pythagorean maxim). Then, too, Ishmael is an insular Manhatto, like I was, a former schoolteacher as I was. I couldn’t resist. I carried a tattered, annotated copy around with me during my travels and kept it on my desk and sought inspiration in its pages. It sustained as well as daunted me. Frankly, I’d almost to prefer to talk about Melville’s book than mine.

Nathaniel Missildine pays tribute to that elite breed of fathers, the ones who stay at home.

Observations, ruminations, consternation…. an older writer and father takes his constitutional and is a little saddened as he observes the passing of Western Civilization. But Vincent gives him some hope.

The second in a series of three essays on Gina Frangello’s seriously old, half-deaf father, his lifelong man-crush on Cary Grant, and what the hell his neighbors are doing with fake rats in their backyard.

Somehow you get from Point A to Point Y, knowing Point Z–end point–is next in the line-up. Gina Frangello devotes a series of essays to her father’s 88 strange, colorful and contradictory years on earth, from young jazz enthusiast and bartender to officially crotchety old man who doesn’t need a hearing aid because what you say is boring anyway.