June 2012
1 post
1 tag
May 2012
8 posts
3 tags
4 tags
brown oh brown
So strange to be in the young alumni tent, look around, and think “this is what it felt like when I was in college, these were the people.”
There’s something so special about this place. I am not one to wax poetic about locations — I am ‘transitory’ at best, but Brown is different. It isn’t until you leave that you realize not everyone treats their...
2 tags
Ian McEwan: "Hand on the Shoulder"
newyorker:
My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with “plume”), and forty years ago, in my final year at Cambridge, I was recruited by the British security service. In the early spring of 1972, when exams were only weeks away, I found a new boyfriend, a historian called Jeremy Mott. He was of a certain old-fashioned type—lanky, large-nosed, with an out-sized Adam’s apple. He was unkempt, clever in an...
1 tag
April 2012
8 posts
2 tags
2 tags
There were phrases of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that still made Coe cry....
– ‘The Man with the Miniature Orchestra’ by Dave Algonquin.
Mad Men, Signal 30
2 tags
1 tag
new england. enough said.
Today, I saw an old man in slightly tattered clothing walk towards me very slowly on the street. He kept looking at me as I neared him, and I braced myself for creepiness/awkwardness/hostility.
Turns out, all he said was “hi” in the most innocuous tone ever.
What the fuck has this place done to me. There is no way I’m spending the rest of my life acting cold to people as a...
3 tags
March 2012
8 posts
3 tags
2 tags
1 tag
February 2012
8 posts
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
January 2012
8 posts
1 tag
resolutions, notes, film
Have officially lived on the East Coast for over four years.
Must strive to reverse undesirable New England habits, including, but not limited to: not smiling at strangers on the street, deferring to awkwardness, inability to hold eye contact, expecting anyone who works a cash register to have a terrible attitude.
Meanwhile - allow conversations to transpire without first mentally projecting their...
1 tag
2 tags
3 tags
Books Read - 2011
Long Day’s Journey Into Night - Eugene O’Neill
Under Western Eyes - Joseph Conrad
Guerillas - V.S. Naipaul
Regeneration - Pat Barker
Angels in America - Tony Kushner
Wolf Dreams - Yasmina Khadra
Darkness Visible - William Styron
The Violent Bear It Away - Flannery O’Connor
Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee
Wit - Margaret Edson
My Loose Thread - Dennis Cooper
...
December 2011
10 posts
3 tags
1 tag
4 tags
The English Patient
“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of...
3 tags
3 tags
Looking For Each of Us, by Linda Gregg
I open the box of my favorite postcards and turn them over looking for de Chirico because I remember seeing you standing facing a wall no wider than a column where to your left was a hall going straight back into darkness, the floor a ramp sloping down to where you stood alone and where the room opened out on your right to an auditorium full of people who had just heard you...
4 tags
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Over the years, Sammy had regretted nearly everything about his affair with Bacon except, until now, its secrecy. The need for stealth and concealment was something that he had always taken for granted as a necessary condition both of that love and of the shadow loves, each paler and more furtive than the last, that it had cast. Back in the summer of 1941, they had stood to lose so much, it...