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My Essays

Casting Sophia Coppola in ‘The Leopard’

My Twitter friend the writer Kim Askew invited me to guest post on her site Romancing the Tome last week as part of a celebration of the release of her new book Tempestuous (co-authored with Amy Helmes). I wrote about one of my favorite novels The Leopard by the Italian writer Giuseppe di Lampedusa and why director Francis Ford Coppola should use it as a vehicle to redeem Sophia Coppola’s notoriously poor acting performance in his 1990 film The Godfather III.

picture-sohia-coppola
Hoping Sophia Coppola one day stars in ‘The Leopard’

I was honored to guest post for Kim alongside such luminaries as famed literary networker Lauren Cerand, writer and editor Edward Champion and publisher Richard Nash.

This is not the first time I’ve written about Sophia Coppola. Last year in The Millions I imagined moving to Paris and bumping into Sophia and her singer husband Thomas Mars somewhere in the Latin Quarter.

Categories
My Essays

My Essay in ‘The Millions’

I recently published an essay on the online literary site The Millions titled, “Paris, Wikipedia and My Middle Age Crisis.”

Each man’s middle age crisis begins at an indeterminate age and offers a peculiar window into the architecture of masculine decline. In this respect it mimics death, which is both punctual and ruthlessly efficient in its demolitions. For many men, the crisis begins with the fear that your Emersonian Self-Reliance is spent, or even worse, you’ve sucked so deeply on the marrow of life that you are now as penniless as Henry David Thoreau . . . Go here to read the full essay.