Don’t be afraid of dying. The glass of water Is quickly poured into the waiting goblet. Your face that will be of no further use to mirrors Grows more and more transparent, nothing is hidden. It’s night in the remotest provinces of the brain, Seeing falls back into the great sea of light. How strange…
“In most cultures, stories entail causality and goals, and so that’s what listeners expect when they hear a story. This expectation is so strong that the listener will use them when remembering the story, even if the story lacked these elements.” –Daniel T. Willingham “The Privileged Status of Story” (2004) “By telling stories, you objectify…
She hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of wom, the beginning of the name of what she was—a woman. A mown lawn had a sad sound to it, like a long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan. Lawn had some of the letters of man,…
Exactly twenty years ago I was entering my fourth month of living as an expatriate English teacher in Pusan (a.k.a. Busan) South Korea. This was my first experience of living in another country, and those first few months were difficult — partly because of culture shock, partly because of what-the-hell-am-I-doing-in-life mid-twenties crisis, and partly because…
For the past several years now I have, unfortunately, found it nearly impossible to reply to all the emails various people send my way. I feel a faint sense of guilt when I leave messages unanswered, but there are reasons why I don’t always respond. So, while I always enjoy hearing from people, you’ll up your odds…
Trying to protect his students’ innocence he told them the Ice Age was really just the Chilly Age, a period of a million years when everyone had to wear sweaters. And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age, named after the long driveways of the time. The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more than an outbreak…
This Sunday I’ll be watching the Patriots and Falcons play Super Bowl LI via wee-hours live-stream in the southern African beach town of Swakopmund, Namibia. This game-day ritual is a time-honored tradition for me: Since I first traveled overseas 20 years ago, I’ve followed Super Bowl games from 16 different cities in 9 separate countries…
1) Plays are written with a communal audience in mind I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness. A novelist writes a novel and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal…
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum. But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as…
Cultural criticism: The Sears catalog might well be considered a great work of American literature, having influenced the syntax of advertising, transformed mail-order commerce, and catalyzed America’s (decidedly democratic) language of desire.
A 2021 podcast-interview episode about this essay is online here. Twenty-five years ago my friend Liesl made me an audiocassette mixtape called Rondo Rolf. I haven’t owned a functioning tape player for more than a decade, yet I can’t bring myself to throw Rondo Rolf out, since that would be akin to, say, burning a treasured scrapbook…
