May 2013
2 posts
Skyward for Joy
Green by Charles Douthat
Some days I walk down the street where we lived and the fat man who stole tomatoes sits under the same old sycamore tapping out his angry rhythms on the knotted roots. And though the children are no longer ours, the oaks are no less generous to the sidewalks with their shade. Overhead, sweet air still arrives through many simple branches— some reaching skyward...
April 2013
4 posts
“Flesh proved vulnerable, as flesh is wont to do, but the spirit merely trembled...”
– Dennis Lehane, on the resilient city
Loose Changes
Naming the Stars/ Joyce Sutphen
This present tragedy will eventually turn into myth, and in the mist of that later telling the bell tolling now will be a symbol, or, at least, a sign of something long since lost. This will be another one of those loose changes, the rearrangement of hearts, just parts of old lives patched together, gathered into a dim constellation, small consolation. Look, we...
March 2013
1 post
February 2013
3 posts
Double Agents in Love →
Lorrie Moore on Homeland, and…Silver Linings Playbook? Ok.
“The shock of the twenties is how narrow that window of experience really is, and...”
– Nathan Heller, “the twentysomethings are all right.”
January 2013
5 posts
Wake up high up/ frame bent
Things to Do in New York (City) by Ted Berrigan
for Peter Schjeldahl
Wake up high up
frame bent & turned on
Moving slowly
& by the numbers
light cigarette
Dress in basic black
& reading a lovely old man’s book:
BY THE WATERS OF...
Standing on the edge of a forest
Lay Back the Darkness by Edward Hirsch
My father in the night shuffling from room to room
on an obscure mission through the hallway.
Help me, spirits, to penetrate his dream
and ease his restless passage.
Lay back the darkness for a salesman
who could charm everything but the shadows,
an immigrant who stands on the threshold
of a vast night
without his walker or his cane
and cannot remember...
December 2012
4 posts
He also wrote that reality was growing more... →
We've reached home court, this year is done. Let's...
Greetings Friends, by Ian Frazier
The power’s back on! Let’s dry our socks,
And turn the volume down on Fox,
Mix up a vat of eggnog, brandied,
And fling a last Bronx cheer at Sandy.
Kick out the jams! Swing wide the gates!
Yeah, everybody—celebrate!
Come on in, friends. Pull up a chair,
Or hunker by the fireplace there.
Belt out a carol denominational,
Or not, if that seems,...
November 2012
10 posts
winters of endless light
At The Same Time by WS Merwin
While we talk
thousands of languages are listening
saying nothing
while we close a door
flocks of birds are flying through winters
of endless light
while we sign our names
more of us
lets go
and will never answer
when your belief in justice merges with your...
Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy by Thomas Lux
For some semi-tropical reason when the rain falls relentlessly they fall
into swimming pools, these otherwise bright and scary arachnids. They can swim a little, but not for long
and they can’t climb the ladder out. They usually drown—but if you want their favor, if you believe there is a justice, rewards for not loving
the death of ugly and even...
“There was too much inflow for a single person’s outflow. I got a sense of how...”
– Sam Anderson, on the trappings of sports celebrity, in a great article about the OKC Thundah
sometimes I turn up the radio
November, 1967 by Joyce Sutphen
Dr. Zhivago was playing at the Paramount Theater in St. Cloud. That afternoon, we went into Russia, and when we came out, the snow was falling—the same snow that fell in Moscow. The sky had turned black velvet. We’d been through the Revolution and the frozen winters. In the Chevy, we waited for the heater to melt ice on the windshield, clapping our hands to...
October 2012
4 posts
WatchHe’s Kelz ‘cause he’s Kelz, you ain’t ‘cause you not.
September 2012
13 posts
“There is no honor in relativism when radicals of any faith exploit religion to...”
– Interesting counterpoint.
How is it possible to want so many things/ and...
How to Like It by Stephen Dobyns
These are the first days of fall. The wind at evening smells of roads still to be traveled, while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns is like an unsettled feeling in the blood, the desire to get in a car and just keep driving. A man and a dog descend their front steps. The dog says, Let’s go downtown and get crazy drunk. Let’s tip over all the...
“The Prada bag will always have a lot of stuff in it. Your condo is infinite. You...”
– 25 Greatest Obsolete Rap Terms
Whose other side/ is salvation
In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver
Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my...
The genesis of Don Gately. →
“You will be unsurprised to hear the Jiggaman paid.”
– Zadie Smith on Jay-Z, which, obviously, YES PLEASE. Bonus points for quoting Dead Presidents and the like. But then again: Jay-Z as the elder statesman - takeme back to Reasonable Doubt time.
August 2012
17 posts
“F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong. He didn’t know it, and he couldn’t have guessed...”
– an amazing paragraph by Anthony Lane, on Neil Armstrong
“But fandom is fundamentally a spiritual arrangement. It is a form of surrender,...”
– Steve Almond on the art and agony of fandom
“Everywhere, it seemed, everyone’s inalienable rights were grinding against...”
– Jon Mooallem, on monkeys among us. Sometimes you find allegories in the strangest places, if you look at them right.
