Tonight I will be home by ten. If I’m lucky I’ll finish this post and still have time to read another chapter, maybe two, before my mind begins to melt. I’m 25, unwed, no kids, and except for the meeting across town I’ll spend nearly the whole day in my neighborhood.
I entered my Havana apartment and was pleasantly surprised to find that the Cuban boyfriend had already turned one of the four available channels to the Jimmy Carter press conference. It was the statesman’s second visit to Cuba; the first was in 2002.
A Life in Three Acts: Tourism and Transcendence in Cuba’s Escambray Read More »
I’m new here! I am: 1) The interim fiction editor of This Fine Publication, Michigan Quarterly Review. 2) A blogger. For whom do I blog? I blog for thee.
In Which We Direct You To A Most Excellent Writer, For Purposes of Laughing Read More »
I’ve been thinking about Facebook a lot lately. Or maybe I don’t mean *lately.* Maybe I should just come clean and say: I think a lot about Facebook. Who doesn’t, really?
Why Fiction Writers Need Facebook Read More »
I spent most of yesterday putting together notes to write a defense of James Franco and his work.
It was a March evening in Havana and still hot at 6 pm. I was on my way to my apartment in the central neighborhood of Vedado on a street called Zapata.
A Life in Three Acts: Havana Pipe Dreams Read More »
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, “things you can do” books were sprouting like weeds.
It’s the cruellest month: lilacs, dead land, spring rain…you know how it goes. For several reasons this April has seemed particularly dismal to me, not in small part due to an car accident that occurred earlier, in March.
The “sparrow’s flight from dark to dark”: Eleanor Wilner’s “The Morning After” Read More »
I was out all day with friends playing basketball and eating Ethiopian food, and I also managed my fantasy baseball teams and watched My So-Called Life.
Although our lives cannot occur except in an historical context, many contemporary lyrics are written as though only personal history matters. It’s a great joy to encounter a poem grounded in history as thoroughly as Elizabeth Bishop’s “Brazil: January 1, 1502”, particularly one that begins with a cymbal crash, the seeming non sequitur or unusual plural.
Come A Little Bit Closer Now Baby: Elizabeth Bishop’s “Brazil: January 1, 1502” Read More »
