Contact me

Passages

• If I could ask someone to paint these headaches, I would ask Hieronymus Bosch, channeling Georgia O’Keefe, and working with Mark Rothko’s palette and technique. Something grotesque but suffused in both color and form, fantastic and yet imbedded in the ordinary; sublime, too, but grounded in our physical world.

  From (thus).

• What if we were to let go completely of the idea that we need a certain amount of bluster or bravado to “promote ourselves” and instead consider how we might let what we love most about our intimate writing lives overflow a bit onto the people around us?

  From The Path of Possibility

• When I was 16 . . . I went to a jazz-and-poetry concert in Leeds. I can’t remember now how we swung it. Our boarding school, 13 miles from the city streets, set amongst the wind-swept fields around Wetherby, was of liberal persuasion. But the Head, a muscular Quaker committed to bracing rambles across the moors, preferably in driving horizontal rain, believed jazz to be decadent and sybaritic.

  From Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

• Both Black Friday and the opening day of deer season involve competition for a limited supply of the most desirable trophies, and the successful competitors are almost invariably those who plot out their strategy well in advance and arrive at their location at least an hour before daylight. But I think the comparison ends there.

  from Via Negativa.

• It turns out that if you blow on the slit in the back of a cicada shell, you can produce a high-piched whistle. Remember, you read it here first! Does it sound like a cicada? Of course not. It sounds like a very small appliance of unclear function. I saw an ad that said Hunters Wanted, & realized I was still wearing a blaze-orange vest. The sun had set hours ago, following an obscure schedule of its own devising.

  From Via Negativa

• To read Tranströmer—the best times are at night, in silence, and alone—is to surrender to the far-fetched. It is to climb out of bed and listen to what the house is saying, and to how the wind outside responds. Each of his readers reads him as a personal secret. For this reason it is strange to see this master of solitude being celebrated in the streets or showing up as a trending topic on Twitter and a best-seller on Amazon. He usually dwells in quieter precincts.

  Teju Cole, from The New Yorker's book blog