I’m at the beach with my husband, wining and dining on the company dime for a business meeting he has to attend, which can feel like icing on a cardboard cake for all the travel he has to do without me. I don’t vacation well. I’ve never enjoyed packing, sleeping in beds not my own, and I’m a complete snot about the beach. At resorts I think “this is what’s wrong with the world”—that millions of people will spend mountains... Read more
In a recent interview about some stories I’ve written, the interviewer asked several questions regarding film. One in particular was thought-provoking: whether the medium of the motion picture provides more fictive metaphors, more imaginative opportunities for use in stories and novels than other artistic means. That is, does the motion picture qua motion picture, with all of its “takes,” and “cuts,” and “angles,” and “storyboards,” and all of its surrounding glamour and artificiality, provide a world more likely to stimulate... Read more
My reading habits, I confess, aren’t literary. I probably lack the training and the gifts necessary to make them so. Instead, they’re theological. I read like a porn addict scours the Internet. Only my pornography is God-talk and my Internet some piece of literature or another. Thus I’m sent into near ecstasy when Stavrogin and Kirillov delve into the latter’s nihilism in Dostoevsky’s Demons but, only a few pages later, the author’s scrupulous descriptions of nineteenth-century Russian decorum plunge me... Read more
Maria walks amid the thorn Kyrie eleison. Maria walks amid the thorn, Which seven years no leaf has born. Jesus and Maria. —From the hymn “Maria walks amid the thorn” Sometimes there is a song underneath the deepest silence. (more…) Read more
Karen An-Hwei Lee lays out her poem “Meditation on Soteriology” so that it looks at first like prose. But you don’t have to read far before you see the wild conjunction of images as poetry. “Paradises of flora and flame,” for instance, takes us aback, since we’d expect to read “flora and fauna.” Similarly with “psalms of untilled / ardor”: we expect a noun like “earth” or “land” to follow “untilled.” The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam wrote that “poetry shakes... Read more
Last week, one of my favorite authors, William H. Gass, died at ninety-three. He was an elder statesman of postwar American fiction. His novels include the lauded Omensetter’s Luck, The Tunnel, and Middle C, and he also wrote a number of insightful essays on the craft of writing. His prose is difficult, brooding, and deeply lyrical, and his stories are told almost exclusively through the point of view of obsessive, angry protagonists railing against their circumstances. Today, his readership remains... Read more
Every year after the clocks fall back, I read Lia Purpura’s essay “Sugar Eggs: A Reverie” from her collection On Looking. In the essay, Purpura is concerned with the space created when one looks into another world: the panorama built inside a sugar egg, a snow globe, a “horse’s scummy water trough,” cells massing to fight infection inside a boil, a peep show. Also: “Frog spawn, those clear little globes of life, each with a pause and breath at its... Read more
There are, arguably, many ways in which we need to wake up, hence the need for the variety of stories in this list. Some of these films (Something, Anything; Marty; Punch-Drunk Love) involve meek people waking up from lives dominated by peer pressure and social expectations from their friends or family. Other selections on the list (Joe Versus the Volcano, Cléo from 5 to 7, Knight of Cups) involve waking up from a single-minded preoccupation with self and the problems... Read more
“My father says almost the whole world’s asleep. Everybody you know, everybody you see, everybody you talk to. He says only a few people are awake. And they live in a state of constant total amazement.” —Patricia, from Joe Versus the Volcano It seems that we now live in an increasingly polarized, disenchanted, fragmented, and incoherent world. In a world such as this, partisan one-sidedness, nonstop busyness, and unquestioned presumptions are all too common and all too easy. Quick argument... Read more
Thomas Merton wrote, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” I feel like this sentiment is especially potent when the literary and visual arts intermingle. Elizabeth Spires employs aspects of ekphrastic poetry as well as persona poetry in order to both lose and find herself in this imaginative poem. Inspired, possibly, by Edward Hopper’s paintings of lighthouses, the poet becomes a lighthouse in order to explore her internal musings and identity in the world. She... Read more
Good Letters
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