Profiles of Note Lawrence Ferlinghetti: The Lovely Bicycle

We need more role models like this. I know many men and women half or even quater of Ferlinghetti’s age who are not in a position to get to the corner shop without a carr (sic) ...
The man himself rolled up on a bicycle and lashed it to a parking meter and strolled inside, a hell of a handsome figure at 83, in a red shirt and jeans and running shoes, white hair and beard, not a big prophet beard but the trim beard of a boulevardier who looks forward to the next Barolo and the sight of a pretty girl.
There is a story about Ferlinghetti riding his bicycle and running into a hydrant while distracted by the sight of two beautiful women and crashing down in the street, and the two women running over to help him up, the poor old man, who was disappointed that they wouldn't give him their phone numbers.
· Cycle of Life [San Francisco Chronicle]

Alice Sebold: The Lonely Cycle of Bones

I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.
I happened to be fourteen in 1973 as well, but I was not murdered until 7 July 1980, a year before Alice was actually raped. As Jozko Liska once said only in books and on the Internet can dead voices be clearly heard.
For who is Sebold's public, but one that has very recently seen innocents die horribly, one to whom Sebold's fantasy of recuperation and, indeed, an endless, video-like replay has a vital subconscious appeal? (One of the blessings of my heaven is that I can go back to these moments, live them again, and be with my mother in a way I never could have been.) A public, moreover, that is now able to see itself as an entire nation of innocent victims? Immediately after the September 11 attacks, the writer Susan Sontag was widely vilified for having called, in The New Yorker, for a thoroughgoing examination of the ’self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators’ in the wake of the event—a campaign to infantilize the public. Our leaders, she went on:
are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken.... Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics...has been replaced by psychotherapy.
Confidence and grief management are what The Lovely Bones offers, too: it, too, is bent on convincing us that everything is OK—whatever, indeed, its author and promoters keep telling us about how unflinchingly it examines bad things. ’We're here,’ Susie's ghost says, in the final pages of the novel. ‘All the time. You can talk to us and think about us. It doesn't have to be sad or scary.’ The problem, of course, is that it does have to be sad and scary; that you need to experience the badness and fear—as Sebold's characters, none more than Susie herself, never quite manage to do—in order to get to the place that Sebold wants to take you, the locus of healing, and closure: in short, Heaven. And yet what a Heaven it is. In the weeks following September 11, there was much dark jocularity at the expense of those Islamic terrorists who, it was said, had volunteered to die in order to enjoy the post-mortem favors of numerous virgins in Paradise. But how much more sophisticated, or morally textured, is Sebold's climactic vision of Heaven, or indeed of death, as the place, or state, that allows you to indulge a recuperative fantasy of great sex?
· Lovely Dead Bones, like Voices, Never Die [NY Books]