Blogs
-
FADE TO ORANGE: The Theory of Receptivity and Some Thoughts on Ethan Hawke’s Face
Call it the Theory of Receptivity. It’s the idea, often stated by young people and applied as a dismissive accusation to even marginally older people, that one’s taste in music, or film, or literature, or fine cuisine, petrifies during life’s…
-
The Last Book I Loved: Away
I fall in love with books all the time. I remember periods of my life this way – like “what’s-his-name left me when I was reading Mrs. Dalloway” or “I got my first bra during the winter when I read…
-
Tinkers, by Paul Harding
Tinkers is a novel steeped in, and obsessed with, minutiae. Whether describing the inner workings of a clock, the network of ducts and wires that runs through a home, or the contents of a salesman’s cart, Paul Harding seems to…
-
The Last Book I Loved: Rodinsky’s Room
In 1969, a lonesome amateur scholar, David Rodinsky, disappeared without trace from his caretaker’s garret above the Princelet Street Synagogue in Jewish East London. His room, unsealed a decade later, was filled with curious artifacts, including a street atlas of…
-
The Last Book I Loved: Stop-Time
A few times over a life, you find a book that inspires a physical kind of love: you can’t be far from it, stroke it absently for reassurance, take it to bed at night—slip it under your pillow or shove…
-
BAD MOMMY BLOG: Six Reasons Why The Bad Mommy Will Never Be A Good Socialite
1. Saturday night party/silent auction for a school. Daniel Kim was there, looking around. My husband goes, “Hey, are you lost?” 2. One of the items up for bid was to be the headmaster for a day. In the program this…
-
The Last Book I Loved: Atmospheric Disturbances
Galchen keeps us wound tight with anxiety, desperately waiting for some ray of hope for a man with a badly damaged mind and heart.
-
Poetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
Interesting conversation going on about a piece in the latest Poetry. Start here at Samizdat, then find further discussion at A Compulsive Reader, Exoskeleton (multiple posts–click around), and back to Samizdat. And since it started over an article written by…
-
“I am lonely. Truly, bone-chillingly, ceaselessly lonely.”
Dear Sugar, I am lonely. Truly, bone-chillingly, ceaselessly lonely. I just moved to a new city, and I’m worried no one would take time to identify the body if I got hit by a car. All my friends have boyfriends.…
-
The Last Book I Loved: The Centaur
I read The Centaur by John Updike out of funereal obligation, and had given up on it twice before, but this time put my misgivings to rest and plowed through what is surely the most tender evocation of father-son affection…
-
FUNNY AMERICA: Bye American
Can we stop with the waving of the sharp instruments for a minute and speak rationally to this whole ugly recession mess we find ourselves currently mired in? C’mon. You know what recession mess I’m talking about. You’re packing a…
-
The Last Book I Loved: The Wordy Shipmates
I fall in love pretty easily, so for me right now it’s Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates, which is her take on John Winthrop, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson of Puritan ancestry fame. I love it because Vowell’s feelings toward…