October 28, 2013
Thought and Expression
About ten seconds ago, when I opened up my copy of Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story, a matchbook cover from an Italian restaurant fell out. I don’t recognize the restaurant […]
October 24, 2013
Tesseract Days
One of the many benefits of having a child is that I’m able to read and watch good stories on a regular basis. These stories are often short, and involve […]
October 11, 2013
Skyscrapers of Light
In 1938, Westinghouse buried a time capsule in a section of Queens described as a “valley of ashes” in The Great Gatsby. The time capsule was supposed to contain a […]
September 26, 2013
Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865: A Review, Part 1
A year ago, my companion, kids, and I moved to a new house. Our new landlords were moving to New York. They asked us to send them their mail. Periodically, […]
September 22, 2013
Relentless: Moose Tracks and Donald Goines
I’m a binge ice cream eater, partial to Moose Tracks. For a long time, I favored chocolate. But late one night a couple years back, after my companion and kids […]
September 7, 2013
Banga! Banga! Banga!
Patti Smith plays tonight at Detroit’s Majestic Theatre. I’ll be there, touching base with my three-decades-ago self, that self that used to sing along (badly) to cassette tapes of Horses […]
September 6, 2013
The Passing of Giants
It’s an old saw that friends and family tend to pass in clusters. But recent days have seen the loss of two dear friends of The Kenyon Review and poets of […]
August 30, 2013
The Literary Self(ie)
My favorite part of any literary biography or memoir is usually the glossy white section with the photographs. The photo section, along with the text, constructs the literary self we […]
August 30, 2013
This World: Dig It
All morning, from across the bogs and beyond the whale-road, tributes have been pouring in for Seamus Heaney. It’s a lovely thing to witness: words (by Heaney, by his admirers) […]
August 29, 2013
Pocketbooks, Part 4: The End of Cleaver (no matter what)
Several of my more terrifying hours were spent in a holding cell awaiting transport to the Los Angeles County jail. Seventy, eighty prisoners, most in orange jumpsuits, loitered in the […]
August 20, 2013
Café of the Future
The Long Now Foundation is hiring volunteers to curate their “Manual for Civilization,” a collection of 3500 volumes to be shelved in the Long Now Salon. Founded in “01996,” Long […]
August 16, 2013
Pocketbooks, Part 3 (A)
I have a friend who is a poet immersed in the question of whether one person can truly know another. At work a couple weeks back, mulling the question over, […]