January 2010
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"It was irresponsible for me to have bought this house," he thought. "And yet it is so glamorous, so desirable. I should have inspected it more closely. There are many parts of the building that I've never even looked into. Take this room, for example. It's far too long and narrow to be useful I…
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Here is a sentence drawn from a contract for new condominium construction. "The laundry room flooring is a composition tile called Stonewalk; it is a warm light color that compliments all of the wood floor options." And here's a second sentence from the same contract: "bedroom carpets are a warm light color that compliments all…
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J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is an anti-bildungsroman — a "novel of education" without the least shred of moral, intellectual, or spiritual growth. Holden Caulfield, the novel's naive yet jaded narrator, learns absolutely nothing either about himself or about life. Unable to profit from his various encounters, he dismisses almost everyone he…
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Last night, I had a specific sense that I hadn't been sleeping in clover. I worried for hours and I worried about everything. I started, I think, by brooding on the inevitability of a comet striking the earth and extinguishing life as we know it. From there I moved to the collapse of the ecosyste.…
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Package to mail, so off I go to the post office. When I arrived, eight people are on line ahead of me. I took my place. There were only two clerks on duty and let me tell you they were not breaking any speed records. They were moving as though through mucilage. If I had…
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The miller in The Miller of Angibault is, according to George Sand, really, really huge. "The big miller descended, stretching, from his corn-loft, cracking the joints of his long arms and legs. He was well-proportioned, robust, easy in his movements, and strikingly featured. This specimen of the countryside was remarkable for a region whose inhabitants are…
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Edith Wharton loved the "motor" but never lost her nostalgia for the horse drawn vehicles of her youth. A passage in A Backward Glance (1932) conveys the novelty and thrill of her virgin voyage. "There were no motors in 1903; but as a toy for the rich they were beginning to appear. My old friend…
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What would prompt a guy to dream that his carrots were growing upside-down? Their abundant orange roots pointing straight into the air? What point is my dreamatorium trying to make? In this particular nightmare, I'm absolutely perplexed about photosynthesis. If they're upside-down, how do they..? There's more. In the dream, my lettuce is growing right-side-up,…
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From our window, looking left across the street, we can see a squat old cinder-block building that sits diagonally on its corner lot. I remember when it housed a gas station, then a taqueria, and afterward, for at least a decade, an import rug store that was always 'going out of business,' until, contrary to…
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A friend of long standing (a Shakespeare scholar) has posted a recipe for a dish that she calls grieven but which was known as gribbinis in our part of the world. It was a staple of my childhood, perhaps even my favorite food. Gribbinis also linked me to my grandma. Inasmuch as she didn't speak the only…