One thing I hadn’t fully realized before I started planning to move to Virginia: moving any great distance involves a curious combination of practicalities and undercurrents of emotion. The last couple of times I moved, it was only across town; before that, when I moved from Chicago to Collegeville, I had no furniture and I […]
His imagination was singularly vigorous and creative; and no doubt it derived additional force from the habitual use of morphine, which he swallowed in great quantity, and without which he would have found it impossible to exist. It was his practice to take a very large dose of it immediately after breakfast each morning, — […]
…and I’m zonked out. Generally fried, in fact. I should sleep before long. However, in trashy-television news, I watched part of tonight’s episode of The Swan out of a certain sick, fascinated curiosity, and it’s every bit as loathsome as people are saying it is. Further commentary is probably superfluous; I must, however, register my […]
I’m no longer panicking about the necessity of finding a new job by next September, primarily thanks to friends here in Collegeville and elsewhere. R., over the phone, gave me a job-search pep talk and urged me to come to New York, where she is; H. said encouraging things about how the change is likely […]
I was having a wretched Sunday, full of ungraded papers and free-floating anxiety. (Have you ever really, really wanted something — say, a fellowship — and been consumed with terror that you won’t get it, and also with terror that if you think about it too much you’ll jinx it? And have you ever been […]
This morning I walked to campus through the remains of a thick winter fog, the kind of fog where you can barely see the sun as a dull white disc trying to burn through. It was below freezing, and the fog had left a fine layer of frost on everything. The smaller the object, the […]
Via About Last Night, here: Make your own custom Valentine candy hearts with the Acme Heart Maker. This is one of the prototypes for the fabulous Church Sign Generator. It’s a testament to my overall peevishness about Valentine’s Day that I came up with the following: Why the peevishness? Because I have a bad history […]
Found at my local library’s big semiannual used book sale today: Alice Fulton, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of PoetryPaul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic FormHerbert Liebowitz, ed., Parnassus: Twenty Years of Poetry in ReviewJ. D. McClatchy, ed., The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry All together, they cost a grand total […]
I made a bunch of New Year’s resolutions, but they more or less boiled down to three or four. Here they are. In 2004, I will: make time to write every day, even if it’s only for ten minutes at a time; ask for what I want (in the job-search, but also more generally); not […]
I’ve returned from my vacation with only a few days to spare before classes start up again (Midwestern U. begins its winter term insanely early). I spent Christmas day with my family, all of us opening presents, eating ourselves silly in the middle of the day, and then playing a game of Trivial Pursuit that […]