We were sixteen when they evacuated the gymnasium in the middle of the English exam (anonymous bomb threat, year after Columbine). I was writing on Roethke – not the poem we’d read in class and most everyone agreed told the … Read More
He no longer sleeps in the bed they shared. He did for a little while, which surprised me. I would have thought her absence would have been the most palpable there, but I suppose the imprint on her pillow was the nearest thing he had to a kiss goodbye.
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
I. The old man and the old woman have been married for many years. Scattered around their small house are indications of the time that has passed; a doll the husband brought back from Japan, in a paper-thin kimono that … Read More
Blue Valentine writer and director Derek Cianfrance’s latest film The Place Beyond the Pines is, if anything, a study in what Robert Penn Warren, legendary 1940s author of All the King’s Men, calls “the awful responsibility of Time.” We begin with Ryan Gosling’s character Luke Glanton, a reckless circus-performing motorcyclist. Seemingly out of nowhere, Luke has great responsibility thrust upon him when an old flame from an upstate New York carnival stop steps back into his life with his infant son.
Academia is awash with fifty dollar words that few can buy. Those terms, spoken in a certain style, presented in papers, at conferences, 4:30 lectures, were once music to my ears. Now all I hear is the caustic evasion of … Read More
Writer’s note: I typed this thing before seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and then after I saw it I felt scooped. So don’t get hung-up about it, just be fascinated by how much all this stuff is in the ether, as they say.
In my house there is a library. It used to be called the playroom, back when I was very small and very young and learned what _Don Quixote_ was by watching the _Wishbone_ episode. It was a library then, too, … Read More
Slug Polaroid ?I.?On a walk through Killarney, I dodge wet loaves.?They would soon stick to sole:?husky bits of polka-dotted licorice,?black pudding gnocchi.??II.?I imagine plasmodial slime mold and black bear cubs?would spawn something like this glossy lump.??III.?At a house near Volx, … Read More
Eight years ago street artist Banksy disguised himself, entered the British Museum, and put a piece of his own work up on a wall. It was a slab of concrete, on which he had painted a cave figure drawing of a man with a shopping cart. Banksy even added an object label reading that this cave drawing pictured “early man venturing towards the out-of-town hunting grounds,” and was created by artist “Banksymus Maximus.”
