January 30, 2016
Clowns and Music
In the spring of 2014, a friend sent me an article that had appeared a few weeks earlier in Grantland. The article concerned a clown—“a really sad clown, sadder than […]
January 27, 2016
The Rhinoceros and the Hippopotamus
Where is the great nonsense of our time? You might say that our political world is replete with nonsense, but that’s not the kind of nonsense I mean. True nonsense […]
December 31, 2015
This Beautiful Skin of Ice
In yesterday’s scramble to learn what I could about the novelist Adrian Barnes, I happened upon several interviews and essays in which Barnes names Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as his […]
December 30, 2015
Land of Nod
In the past week I’ve read three books, each of which focuses on a different problem. In Laura van den Berg’s Find Me, the problem is memory. In Chester Brown’s […]
December 8, 2015
Trump, Saunders
Throughout the summer and into the fall, I felt that Donald Trump’s hijacking of the Republican storyline was pretty funny. Recently, it’s become less funny; and yesterday it stopped being […]
November 30, 2015
Looking. Looking Again (Part Two)
If it’s good to look, might it be better still to look again? That’s my hope—and I’ve been betting my writing life on that hope all year. I wrote about […]
November 29, 2015
Looking. Looking Again (Part One)
Earlier this month I spent some time at the University of Washington’s Marine Station in Friday Harbor. The occasion was the UW’s fourth annual Poetry and Science Symposium; a terrific […]
November 25, 2015
Twelve Things
What follows are twelve things I’ve read or reread lately (and which may, on some level, speak to one another), and for which I’m grateful: Dean Young: Some things, like […]
October 31, 2015
Lowell, Bishop, Berryman
In today’s New York Times, Christopher Isherwood reviews Dear Elizabeth, a play by Sarah Ruhl that tracks the friendship (mostly epistolary) of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. Isherwood writes something […]
October 30, 2015
Holograms and Hurricanes (Part Two)
Last week I wrote about Don DeLillo’s prescience in forecasting the return of Redd Foxx and Andy Kaufman. (They’re back! As holograms.) This week I thought I’d shift from holograms […]
October 25, 2015
Holograms and Hurricanes (Part One)
In yesterday’s New York Times, a story caught my eye: Redd Foxx and Andy Kaufman are heading back on tour. Sure, they’ve been dead for decades (Foxx died in 1991, […]
September 30, 2015
Thirty-Odd Poets
As Robert Frost once wrote (riffing on a line from Hamlet), “Play’s the thing. All virtue in ‘as if.’” Last Thursday, at the New School, thirty-odd poets (the hyphen is important) […]