From the category archives:

Prose

What’s Your Style Book of Choice?

Thumbnail image for What’s Your Style Book of Choice? October 8, 2010

I followed Strunk religiously until I read Geoffrey Pullum’s extensive bitchfest in the Chronicle of Higher Education about Strunk & White, and in recent years I have reconsidered my devotion.

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I create the whole universe blink by blink

Thumbnail image for I create the whole universe blink by blink April 25, 2010

I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly—as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. I create the whole universe blink by blink… “The world resists me and I resist the world,” I said. “That’s all [...]

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Portland

Thumbnail image for Portland March 25, 2010

I’m sitting up in bed, or on the couch, as it were, where I have been trying to sleep off the slew of vodka-and-tonics I downed last night at our Sand Paper Press reading here in Portland.  Shawn Vandor, whose Fire at the end of the rainbow was just reviewed over at Dossier, and I [...]

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NOTES ON NOISE

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People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share…
-Paul Simon

Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds….
-Vladimir Nabokov

To my wife Anne, without whose silence this book never would have been written.
-Philip K. Dick, dedication page from The Man in the High Castle

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As If She Were a Symbol of Something

Thumbnail image for As If She Were a Symbol of Something March 17, 2010

Before I post my regularly scheduled post, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I give you an excerpt from James Joyce’s “The Dead.”

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A Cuban Sandwich and Levinas

Thumbnail image for A Cuban Sandwich and Levinas February 23, 2010

Suppose you are reading Levinas, having a nice Cuban sandwich, minding your business, thinking about the self, the other, the other self, the otherness of self, the selfishness of other, etc, etc, and the sun slants across the legs of a woman you pretend to have a deep rapport with—striping them apricot. What do you do?

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Some Books on My Mind, or {Potential} Purchases of Imperishables

Thumbnail image for Some Books on My Mind, or {Potential} Purchases of Imperishables February 21, 2010

Hands up, anyone who has read the whole of Herodotus and the whole of Thucydides! And Saint-Simon? And Cardinal de Retz? But even the great nineteenth-century cycles of novels are more often talked about than read.

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Tangent

February 17, 2010

On fourth of July, alone in my kitchen and the sound of distant fireworks. I drink cheap Merlot, watch the dark break and enter through the windows. I am all over the Internet, but would rather be all over someone else: a tangent. A tanager. Today, by the river I saw a scarlet tanager. Had [...]

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The Melody Ascends Stepwise

February 15, 2010

A missing Pleiades in the viewable cluster of stars cannot deny us motion though we cannot master its name: there is something you are not telling me standing at the standing stone detained neither by chicken wire nor the upright megalith we imagine pulsing and in so thinking feel the earth beneath us breathe: [...]

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