On a damp Friday afternoon in November, traversing the broad, entirely empty main courtyard has the feeling of trespassing. Whitman’s Class of 1970 theater is the setting, this particular Friday afternoon, for a screening of ‘Einstein and Margarita,’ a so-called “media opera” composed by Iraida Iusupova and with libretto by Iusupova and the poet Vera Pavlova.
I am on my balcony. I have been here for three days and two nights. It was my wife who put me here. It happened like this:
At dawn, when we wake, she wakes, I see: she, simulacrum of sweetie, presently bovine sweetie, clodhopper lovely, trundle fatly to her boudoir to assess the damage: six digits, the tally. These days, my girl: formidable haunches, breasts sapped of buoyancy, deflated balloon breasts, gobs of fatty skin where there ought only to be loveliness. She squirms into her negligee, once loose-fit, casual, today perilously taut, and thumps into the kitchen. When she walks her feet slap the floor.
James Frey might be the most inarticulate author alive. Also, if he is not one of the most boring, he is clearly the most bored, and his prose is so harried, so egregiously imprecise, that it reads as if it is trying to flee the very tedium of the subject matter.
1. Lines removed from a play The answer’s in the desk. Oh, yes! This PROBABLY cures cancer. Meta! THE OL’ ONE-TWO! A dog eats a cell phone and it keeps ringing in its stomach. Oh, no! …eats the whole thing. … Read More
The first time you die, almost always, you get a feeling in the pit of your stomach, as though someone’s taken the bottom out. It feels like it does when an airplane is landing with you inside, as though all the strings of muscle and tendon holding your insides in place are being strummed by someone’s thumb.
Near dusk, we owe an appropriate fear to the light that may not show on the hilly back of the morning beast. Mother takes our picture at sunset. Her finger pushing and begging that button to hold everything still, appeases … Read More
There were cities that stood boulder-like in the distance There were cities that I loved There were cities where kites could ease greedily among the buildings There were cities in which no honest man could find a life to suit … Read More
I was wearing a woman’s bathrobe and galoshes, and had tied a scarf around my waist. I was too conscious of touch, by then, to wear regular clothing. But I needed to talk to Professor Litvak again, so I had … Read More
A Translation Bernart de Ventadorn “Can vei la lauzeta mover” I When I see the lark break its wings against a sunbeam, forget itself, and fall from that sweet joy that pierces the heart, O—my own could melt, envying all … Read More
I heard the subway pouring out of your mouth. I thought, maybe, it was an early-morning thing, letting sleep spill from your body onto the week-worn floor. I didn’t ask you to reveal this to me, I cling to the … Read More