Had to stop reading a (the?) biography of Clarice Lispector because, no matter how much I love her art and story, the formulaically-placed quotes and source material and objectifying lack of authorial voice gave me indigestion. Perhaps I’m academic-intolerant. So, out of some odd desperation, I started reading Njal’s Saga and got about sixty pages […]
Resist, resist, resist—what about the virtues of just going along? By “virtues” I mean “benefits;” there’s no time for virtue. Maybe I’ve taken it all too literally. The books I’ve read and the stories I’ve admired and the philosophies to which I’ve been drawn—so many have resistance at their core, or so I’ve felt. Maybe […]
It’s hard to say it matters so I keep typing and breathing anyway but isn’t that tragic and sad and literary, a blood-tipped quill stuck to a dangling hand that would be better off waving goodbye to hopes of doing anything other than deleting (keeping) vague rejection notices including those two recent gems from journals […]
The perfect autumn day—by evening, when my toes are cold despite socks and slippers, I might not be so fond. So goes the erosion of goodwill. It’s fifty Fahrenheit degrees and sunny, gusting, and the trees are spreading color everywhere—rain is on the way, though, and the temperature is dropping. It’s fine to not be […]
What are these people doing? How do they have that many clicks in them each day. They just stare at their screens, furrowed, and scroll scroll scroll, click click fucking click. I’m losing my eyesight. The floor is carpeted and the carpet is a combination of thickly woven browns, dutiful and lifeless. A volley of […]
The bass was drowning out the highs, the saxophonist’s mic didn’t work, and for a minute the acoustic-electric guitar was silent till the sound man straightened that out and the performerman in a getup he said made him look like the hypothetical offspring of Johnny Cash and Elton John played his song. The outfit, he […]
Canceled my New Yorker subscription some months ago, as if that would help me feel less scatterbrained, once the basement bargain on the first year of issues expired and I was back to not being special anymore and just like everyone else again. All too trite and elitist, I thought, silently excusing myself from participation in some […]
