Posts by author
Casey Dayan
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Do You Believe in Afterlife?
The Southern Review recently excavated a poem by Aliki Barnstone from 2002, “My Friend Steve Asks if I Believe in the Afterlife.” It begins: When a boy delivering her eulogy / first uttered “mother,” a baby sparrow/ landed on his…
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A Whole Jar of Change
Make your way to The New Yorker, where Elif Batuman makes an inquiry into what has become a dominant American disposition: awkwardness. “Awkwardness,” Batuman argues, “is the consciousness of a false position.” Here is the top-rated definition of awkward in…
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On On Writing
Fourteen years after it’s publication, Stephen King’s On Writing has become a necessary read for anyone interested in prose-burnishing. Follow this string of red letters for a new interview with King on his book with The Atlantic’s Jessica Lahey. Jessica…
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The Beautiful Private Life of the Other
Italian photographer Olivier Fermariello’s collection, Je t’aime moi aussi (NSFW)—a striking gallery of the sexual lives of the disabled—gives a glimpse into the private sphere of those who fall outside culture’s narrow standards of beauty. These people were willing to give…
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Straight out of Kafka
All for a novel? Eighth grade school teacher Patrick McLaw was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education and is currently being investigated by the County’s Sheriff, James Phillips, who explained—somewhat cryptically—that McLaw is at a “location…
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Sprose Poems and Flarf
Dan Piepenbring has had a bee in his bonnet about the spam comments they get over at the Paris Review Daily—”they’re by turns,” he says, “ludic, cryptic, disquieting, emotional, and inadvertently profound”—so fascinating, in fact, that he has kept a…
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Grieving, Not Grammar
In a little more than two weeks, in a Hospice unit tucked away at the edge of the Atlantic, in Brunswick, North Carolina, a free grief-writing workshop will be held. When Vonnegut urged his students to “write a poem, tear…
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Murakami and Brain-Munching Sheep
An old man takes the boy hostage and forces him to memorize a large number of books. The boy eventually realizes that the man plans to absorb the information he’s memorized by eating his brain. With the help of a…
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Again from the Ground Up
Before the mid-1970’s, Somalia had no written alphabet to speak of. In 1972, the Somali government introduced a standard written alphabet, and literacy rates climbed from a measly 5% to nearly 60%. Unfortunately, as an effect of the civil war,…
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Sylvia Plath, Content at the Mall
Like most of her peers, Plath relished consumerism; on her weekends off in New York, “she went straight to Bloomingdale’s in search of another pair of black pumps.” Here’s to another reminder that the mythology can obscure the truth. While…
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Whistling in the Dark
Every generation has its reservations about popular music—all the same, the last few market-driven decades have undoubtedly left their own, new, unique mark on its most contemporary manifestations. Still, there are radio programs out there dedicated to music as such.…
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Fire All the Jugglers
This is the biggest thing, we gotta appeal to sesquicentennials. You know who I’m talkin’ about, these youngsters that have been coming of age in the 1910s and 1920s. They’re obsessed with what’s current and modern. They have at least…