July 2012
10 posts
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Five Writers I Admire Talking About Writers They...
Anne Carson on George Eliot
… when I read George Eliot, I read her for the descriptions of weather. Perhaps that’s the wrong way to read George Eliot, but how comforting, the way she describes light moving over trees and lying on a bench and somebody’s foot there … I think she has a much greater capacity for description than she allows herself. The weather is just a dab at the...
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WatchA poetry hike with Eileen Myles
from “Choke”
The sun had not done more suddenly for a while
it’s like we took off our skin and said it is hot. It’s like we sold our skin & said where did everyone go?
when the weather’s too hot for comfort & we can’t have ice-cream cones it ain’t no sin to take off your skin & dance around in your bones
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Thursday, Verseday
Leigh Stein’s poetry collection, Dispatch from the Future, launches from Melville House Books today—this is one of the brilliant poems that smart readers who buy her book will find in it.
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You’re Mispronouncing My Name Again
This time last year I was an astronaut in a window display at a department store that has since been bought out by another department store. I wore a...
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Currently Reading: The Festival of Earthly...
In the tiny fictional Southeast Asian country of Puchai, Boyd Darrow and his less-than-faithful girlfriend/faux-wife Ulla have sex on a page of blacked-out words, like a letter we aren’t supposed to read. The novel is, in fact, epistolary, a series of apostrophes to the (as yet) unexplained “Hap”—a friend, I assume, and the voice in Boyd’s head that says, “Go deeper into the woods” or...
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A Review: What Happened to Sophie Wilder by...
In an early episode of the HBO show Girls, one character encourages another to have sex with her touchy-feely, 60-something-year-old boss. Because it would “make a good story.”
Sensationalist (I almost wrote sensualist) Internet writer Marie Calloway wrote a now-infamous story for Muumuu House about arranging an affair with a writer she admired. What matters, less than the story, is the brouhaha...
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Nearer, My Couch, to Thee
Here’s Thomas Pynchon’s 1993 essay on sloth (which Tim Kreider mentions in his much buzzed about article, “The ‘Busy’ Trap”).
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In his classical discussion of the subject in the “Summa Theologica,” Aquinas termed Sloth, or acedia, one of the seven capital sins. He said he was using “capital” to mean “primary”...
