From the category archives:

Prose

What’s Your Style Book of Choice?

by Micah Towery October 8, 2010 Academia

I’m sure many of you read Stanley Fish’s articles on the topic ? from a year or so ago. I came from the “great tradition” tradition, the Mortimer J. Adler mindset of reading all the great books in the Western canon. I also got my dose of composition advice, much of coming from the slightly [...]

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I create the whole universe blink by blink

by Evan Hansen April 25, 2010 John Gardner

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

by Stuart Krimko March 25, 2010 Biography

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 reading here in Portland. Shawn Vandor, whose Fire at the end of the rainbow was just , and I read at . Happily I had [...]

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NOTES ON NOISE

by Sarah V. Schweig March 24, 2010 Animals

A. 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, [...]

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As If She Were a Symbol of Something

by Sarah V. Schweig March 17, 2010 Aesthetics

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.” Gabriel had not gone to the door with the others. He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the [...]

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A Cuban Sandwich and Levinas

by Joe Weil February 23, 2010 Fashion

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 [...]

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

by Adam Fitzgerald February 21, 2010 Prose

Richard A. Barney (ed.), “David Lynch: Interviews” KM: If your paintings had sound what would it be like? DL: Different paintings would have different sounds. So This is Love would have a muffled sound like talking through a glove. A Bug Dreams would be a really shrill 15,000-cycle piercing sound. She Wasn’t Fooling Anyone, She [...]

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Tangent

by Joe Weil February 17, 2010 Memoir

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

by Ben Pease February 15, 2010 Poetry and Poetics

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: looking [...]

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