Blog
I want to paint in a foreign language. Beth Ann Fennelly, “Berthe Morisot: Retrospective”
He seemed a veteran of—I don’t know, adolescence, I suppose, which like all wars is particular to the combatant. David Gilbert, & Sons.
Those teen years are when the scars happen. The scars you have to tend to the rest of your life, hoping they heal or fade away. Kevin Sampsell, “I’m Jumping Off the Bridge”
She had reasonable good looks, like many a reasonable girl at Exeter, the product themselves of reasonable mothers, always with dark hair never cut too short and surprisingly bad teeth—if not crooked, then yellow; if not yellow, then with large gums—and with naturally UV-protected skin, glasses almost mandatory but stylishly framed (their most overt fashion […]
This is another story which has been kicking around for a while before it finally was published, Back in the ‘90s, I submitted this to Story, received a hand-written rejection letter and didn’t realize that was a sign I was onto something and didn’t do anything more with the piece for years. This story has […]
The acceptance of this kind of writing is dangerous not because anybody will confuse it with life, will think, “This is what life is like,” but because readers may read it and think, “This is what literature is like.” James Wood, “Tom Wolfe’s Shallowness, and the Trouble with Information.”
If you want to be true to life, start lying about the reality of it. John Fowles, “Notes on an Unfinished Novel.”
Real life now commences, they are informed; the Eden of public education has shut its garden gate. A garden, Levy reflects, of rote teaching dully ignored, of the vicious and ignorant dominating the timid and dutiful, but a garden nevertheless, a weedy patch of hopes, a rough and ill-tilled seedbed of what this nation wants […]
My number went back up to 87 from 83, which is still less than my pre-drop life expectancy, but close enough that I can consider last year’s drop to be the anomaly, although I can still do more to improve my health and perhaps get a little bit more time with my family. In the […]