“GRACE IS THE HARDEST PILLOW”: I review Kathy Shaidle’s poetry collection, Lobotomy Magnificat. Read more

Filling a lack hollows out an even greater lack that demands even more urgently to be filled.—Cigarettes Are Sublime Read more

ADDICTIVE AND HELPFUL GAME: Rice for vocab sk1llz. It took me 180 grains of rice before I was confronted with a word I genuinely didn’t recognize. (“Secern”?? Is that a thing?) Read more

THE RAT IS SMARTER THAN YOU. I recently learned that the working title of Brazil was 1984 1/2–which is hilarious, yes, but focuses on the way the movie is derivative of past dystopias (paleo-futilism?), rather than on the dream that gives the movie its poignance. Also, if you scroll down, there’s a really funny thing about pumpkins. Read more

ZOMBIE VOODOO PIRATES!: So, Tim Powers’s On Stranger Tides.The good: zombie voodoo pirates! Plus lots of action scenes, which aren’t my thing really, but Powers does them incredibly well–action-adventure revealing character and possessing pathos. Two great characters, the puppeteer John Chandagnac and the pirate Phil Davies. And maybe Blackbeard, although he’s more a… character-shaped horror, than a character. As usual, Powers just punishes his characters; you can’t have fantasy of salvage without wrecking everything first. I love how he does... Read more

Like writing, smoking belongs to that category of action that falls in between the states of activity and passivity–a somewhat embarrassed, embarrassing condition, unclean, unproductive, a mere gesture.—Cigarettes Are Sublime Read more

THE MAN-MARY: Some thoughts on a possible feminist reading of the all-male priesthood. I should begin this discussion by saying I’m not convinced this is the right approach, at all. Its sharp divergence from the usual (and, to me, thoroughly unpersuasive) “in persona Christi” explanations may indicate a fundamental problem in my approach. I am presenting this solely as what someone like me sees when she looks at the priesthood. It is entirely possible that the set of “people like... Read more

THE PASSION OF NEW EVE (Or, I Am the Last of the Famous International Playboys): I also ended up thinking about the story of Eve’s creation. We have two creation narratives: God creates all humankind in His image; and God creates male and female. And female comes second. That sucks, right? Like it did for Jacob and David. Second children, last children–these are the ones God fixes upon, again and again. Is Eve yet another youngest son? Is His whole... Read more

HOLD MY HAND A LITTLE LESS: The above posts were all provoked by two things: 1) I’m writing a novel about a transgendered (FTM) Yale student from a Catholic family, and that student’s feminist friends; and 2) because of that novel, I went to a discussion at the Yale Women’s Center: “I Agree with Eve: Women and God.” (The title is due to some kind of creepy evangelical thing, where people wore t-shirts with some dude’s face and the logo,... Read more

IN MY OPTIMISTIC MOMENTS, I THINK THIS IS THE MOST INTELLIGENT COMMENT ON POLITICS I’VE HEARD IN MONTHS: “I’m really convinced that the future will be a struggle between anarchy and chaos.” Read more