Gary Cohen Writes! The Official Blog of Critically Acclaimed Author Gary Cohen

  I remember my brother and I sitting in the kitchen watching our 10 inch black and white tv.  I know what you're thinking, pretty small for a tv, and pretty colorless.  But in fairness, way bigger than watching tv on my phone. It was New Years Eve and PBS was showing Monty Python and The Holy Grail.  This would have been sometime in the mid to late Seventies. I'm not sure if we had seen the series before seeing this movie. I want to say my brother knew what the movie was. That he knew it would be on.  It's a little muddled. It was a long time ago.  If you've never seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail it is loosely based on the legend of King Arthur.  But the knights don't ride horses they are accompanied by man servants who clap together 2 halves of a coconut to simulate the sound of hoofbeats.  There is a witch trial where the witch has a carrot tied to her face for a nose. There are knights who say "ni" and French knights who threaten to, "fart...

  Happy Birthday Nancy! I had never heard of Gabriel García Márquez until my senior year of college. I don't think I'd heard the term magical realism until then either. My public school education, in a very good school system might I add, leaned heavily towards old, dead American white men.  Except in February.  In February we would get an old dead American black man.  Whoops! and my privilege is showing because when I say American I mean United States. Contiguous United States I think. Man, contiguous is a great word isn't it? Even if you didn't know what it meant you could kind of figure it out don't you think? In college I studied business and I was all business about studying business.  I took my electives based on the following criteria: 1. Did they start after 10 am? 2. Did they seem like they would be pretty easy? 3. What about 10:30? Anything start after 10:30? I think at least one semester I was able to finagle a 4 day a week schedule.  Maybe more ...

  There is no synonym for synonym.   That was the thought that started it all.  There was an antonym for synonym: antonym.  There was an antonym for antonym: synonym.  But no synonym for synonym.  It seemed like a terrible oversight. And it's just a word. Someone made up synonym, antonym, and homonym.  Why did they stop there?  A quick aside. I have some very vivid memories of my childhood.  Just flashes.  Most of them are of me being annoyed. I don't know why memories of being annoyed are so special: I am easily annoyed. I remember being very young, and the teacher was giving us our English lesson.  Telling us that from now on, we were going to call words that sound alike "homonyms".  We were going to call opposite words, "antonyms" and we were going to call words that mean the same as each other, "synonyms".  I remember being annoyed because to me it didn't seem like antonym was a particularly more difficult word th...

  I was a child who loved to read. Everyone in my family loved to read. We were book people. My father brought a shopping bag to the library and loaded it up at the new book section. My mother who worked so hard everyday would come home from work, slip into the rattiest nightgown you've ever seen and sit on the couch with a thick book while the rest of us sat and watched tv.  She never watched tv. She thought it was stupid. Which it is, but I love it.  My brother and sister were both voracious readers and could read really fast. Terrifyingly fast.  I was three years younger than my brother and he a year younger than my sister. So as a child I remember them tearing through thick books while I was still reading relatively slim ones. Books were not so long then.  I think that when writers were typing them out by hand they were a little more careful.  It wasn't until the advent of word processors that these 4-500 page books became the norm.  When I was ab...