I remember my mother used to go to bed for the day. The blackness of her mood seemed to darken her room. I don’t know why she left her door open. Maybe she knew, even in her unresponsive state, that she needed to be able to hear us. Maybe she thought it would be less frightening for us if we could see her. She was wrong. She loved us, but she was wrong. We learned not to talk to her.... Read more
Kudos to the university presses that are publishing books of the soundest scholarship for the general reader: books with the highest production values and astoundingly reasonable prices. Here are two that I recommend for readers on your gift list. A Spicing of Birds: Poems by Emily Dickinson, selected by Jo Miles Schuman and Joanna Bailey Hodgman (Wesleyan University Press, $22.95). Did you know that Dickinson wrote 222 poems with references to birds? As the compilers write in their introduction, “Birds... Read more
Restraint. A poet’s restraint. A teacher’s. The penultimate moment of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station”: … Somebody arranges the rows of cans so that they softly say: esso—so—so—so to high-strung automobiles. As I do with most poems assigned for class, I began our exploration of “Filling Station” by reading the poem aloud. But after that, instead of asking a question or two or however many it takes to get a discussion going, I took my seat, turned the poem over to... Read more
I’m guessing that most of you haven’t heard of Joshua Casteel—but you should have. Casteel passed away in August after a short battle with a very aggressive form of lung cancer. He was only thirty-two. An Iraq war veteran, Casteel served as an interrogator at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison shortly after the abuse scandal rocked the US military. He worked to ferret out intelligence that would help US forces capture and kill al Qaeda kingpins and foil the plots... Read more
Today Good Letters welcomes Jessica Eddings-Roeser as a regular contributor. Jessica holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University. A former high school teacher, she now lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband and daughter. We are glad to share her words with you. If you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought... Read more
As Holy Motors begins, a sleepwalker leans against his bedroom wall, upon which a forest is painted. Or might it be a real forest after all? The sleeper—played by filmmaker Leos Carax—moves into it, like Lucy stepping into Narnia, where he finds a strange movie theater and a catatonic audience. Here comes an ancient dog—both magnificent and menacing—stalking down the theater aisle. Perhaps he’s a portent of the death of cinema in the age of digital media. Perhaps he’s Carax... Read more
Guest Post By Christine A. Scheller There’s a scene early in Ang Lee’s majestic Life of Pi film in which the main character watches everything he loves die. Pi is floating in a vast, murky sea as the ship carrying his family and their zoo animals recedes into the distance and sinks. His arms are stretched out wide and his whole body seems to reach for them as they slip away. This is the moment when I forgot I was... Read more
From time to time, a big sheet of butcher paper goes up on the wall at my gym. A question appears in red Magic Marker with space for members to write their answers. The questions range from the overtly fitness related—What’s your favorite workout?—to the more topical—Your favorite part of Thanksgiving dinner? I’ve been tempted, once or twice, to stir up a little trouble by adding Gloria Gaynor or the Monkees (or, for that matter, any tune recorded before 1980)... Read more
Part Three: Standing Before a Painting Guest Post By Daniel A. Siedell A painting is more than meets the eye. And yet, it meets our eye. How are we to respond? Unfortunately, we’re conditioned by museum curators to do all we can to avoid this encounter that puts us in the crosshairs of that paint-smeared canvas. I should know—I was one of those museum curators. (more…) Read more
In the terrible wake of Hurricane Sandy which left my family unscathed without even a loss of power in our part of Brooklyn, our friend Dikran was stranded with his two-year-old daughter on the twenty-eighth floor of a high-rise in the blackout across Lower Manhattan. His wife Jananne was out of the country and unable to get back for another thirty-six hours. There’s no unhappy ending here, as there was (and still is) for so many in the ongoing aftermath.... Read more
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