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Without Fear or Favor
I just spent ten days marveling at Asia. But, despite the magic of travel, no trip I’ve taken has ever been tinged with such sorrow. Every morning for the past ten days, I read an entire physical,...
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Dodging Bullets vs. Shooting Them
By bullets I mean unwanted, unyielding change. By dodging I mean dodging. By shooting I mean effecting. This, then, is the title with which I catalogue the past year and a half, not only my own life,...
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The Veil as Wall
Sad and beautiful at the center of it all, according, at least, to the melancholic Herman Hesse.
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Post Partum
For months I’ve considered embarking on my third book of poems. And for months I have not. I finally know why: the emptiness that “one feels when one has finished a piece of work that was important to...
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Why Steinbeck is Steinbeck
The passage above is found on page 22 of my edition of “Grapes of Wrath.” It usually takes a book 100 pages or so to build up the momentum to drop a beauty bomb such as that. Steinbeck does it in 20....
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Steinbeck Uni
As with sea urchin, it is tempting to lap up good books in an unsighly way: devouring page after page, mouthfuls at a time, no napkin to dab. But, as with sea urchin, it is also hard not to stop and...
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Digital Chips
During a dinner where cellphones made an unwelcome appearance, a good friend recommended Dave Egger’s “The Circle.” It’s a 1989-type cautionary tale about Big Internet set in a mirror version of San...
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Nonnegotiable Time
Neko Case, a the vocalist in cult band “The New Pornographers,” is one of one hundred artists, entrepreneurs and writers interviewed for “In the Company of Women,” a surprisingly unsappy coffee table...
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Image/Identity
About a week ago I visited the Georgia O'Keefe retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum: Living Modern. The exhibit not only centered around her well-known paintings and photographs, but also around her...
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Article 0
Crayola names are getting so good. Timberwolf. Tumbleweed. Goldenrod. Does this mean tumbleweed = amaranth? And magenta has no translation? All beautiful thoughts.
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Even Worse
Out takes from Morgan Parker's "There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé"
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Suburbanization in Reverse
Last week’s Economist cover featured the death of the internal combustion engine via the electric car. The magazine contemplates a bright future where the air is clean, oil grabs become irrelevant,...
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The Atom World
There is a street in LA that has everything, at least, everything that my world needs. Juice, coffee, books, yoga, independent shopping, wine, cheese, parking. On this street, each of these are each...
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Landfall
I realize the picture above is bad. It was taken on a flight at the exact moment the pilot warned of turbulence from Hurricane Harvey, passengers and plane already shaking. The storm about to hit...
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Moving for Love
I don’t usually post twice in a day, but the lines in Ada Limón’s poem above are so beautiful and it is raining so hard that I couldn’t bear to witness alone.
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Slightly Off
“I try to dress in a way that is just slightly off, so the spectator, if he notices, will feel slightly bemused but not excluded, remembering his own imperfect mode of dress.” Poet John Ashbery, as...
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Mercy Me
Scene from Roger Reeves’s “King Me,” which won the Whiting Award for poetry. The last line reminds me of the crowds of airport mouths agape below the televised twirl, twirl, twirl of Irma’s bright red...
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The Handmaid, and the Hurricane’s, Tale
I didn’t pack a book for our flight out of Hurricane Irma’s grasp. What was the point? It wasn’t until the next day, before boarding a flight further away from the storm, that I ventured into a...
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Cosmic Communist Construction
Today I learned that Cosmic Communist Construction is a thing, or, at the very least, the very excellent title of a Taschen coffee table book. Below is one of the hundreds of sculptural images found...
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