They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but that’s how I pick a lot of poetry out at the library. I browse the stacks and just look for what stands out to me on any given day. Since the library is free, there’s nothing to lose by taking a chance! The cover of Jim Moore’s Invisible Strings evokes a melancholy and thoughtfulness that I was in the mood for last week. The back of the book mentioned “death”, and I knew I was […]
Life
A musician’s instrument is broken. He walks to the shop to buy a new one, but each one he tries sounds wrong. He travels across the country to buy another one, but when he comes home it still does not sound right. So he decides to die. Chicken with plums takes place in the eight days were he is waiting to die. He stays in bed thinking over his life, as his children, wife and family visit him to try to talk to him. Nothing […]
Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever.
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people. I cannot emphasize enough how much of a treat Good Omens is. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett will also tell you how much of a treat it is. They will tell you in their introduction and their afterward how much they wrote it for the love of it […]
“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.”
In the documentary The September Issue, the generally intimidating and inscrutable Anna Wintour is shown interacting with her high school- or college-aged daughter. The scene is only a few seconds long, but it shows a very human Wintour, just being a mom trying to be cool in front of her daughter. Sometimes we forget that icons are people. I kept thinking about that scene when reading Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Prior to reading this book, Joan Didion was more of a literary giant or […]