Posts in: meta

My wife and I met twenty-nine years ago today.

I was invited over to a friend’s apartment to meet her — and she ignored me the whole time. No hello, no eye contact. Absolutely nothing. She was utterly unapproachable. Instead, she spent the evening in the other room, forehead-to-forehead with her friend, discussing and analyzing a VHS tape of the modern dance concert she’d choreographed a few weeks earlier. And I could see instantly how smart, articulate, beautiful, and, most of all, strong she was.

Some stories belong to the breath, not to the pixel and keyboard. Some stories need the counterpoint of digressions and indignant amendments, of interruptions to refill the wine glass or the bread bowl, or to choose more music, album by album. They need the bustle and patience of a long evening, the wood and steel rhythms of a well-provisioned table.

So: to hear the rest of the story, you’ll need to be seated across from us, favorite beverage at your elbow, and all the time in the world. And perhaps a story or two for us in exchange.


“I Am Spartacus!”

You know that scene where Faye is mailing letters and she hears “That Thing You Do” on the radio and she and the bass player run down the street screaming like lunatics and then they all dance around Patterson’s appliance shop? Yeah, that. Details to follow.

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Well. Isn’t that just some of the best news I can’t tell anyone yet.


🎙️ I’m this week’s guest on Micro Monday podcast series.

I know, I know: fifty-four minutes isn’t exactly “micro.” Well, after the main interview, we talked for almost forty extra minutes about Until the End of the World, which we’re both very big fans of.

And “cinephile”? Oh I don’t know. I think of myself more as a song & dance man.





“Finished” Begins

In light of the appallingly large number of unread and under-read books of poetry currently glowering from the two full shelves behind me, I have resolved to finish reading two books of poetry each week this year. I’ll be keeping track of what I finish here.

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Quo Vadimus

For quite a few reasons (which I won’t bore you with), 2006 was the worst year of my life, and it ended badly. I am heartily glad it’s over, even if a year is an arbitrary demarcation. All that was bad about 2006 fell within the human universe, and such demarcations, tho arbitrary, are also within the human universe. I am therefore confident that the latter will have a real effect upon the former.

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Walter Ong, Orality & Literacy:

The personal diary is a very late literary form, in effect unknown until the seventeenth century… The kind of verbalized solipsistic reveries it implies are a product of consciousness as shaped by print culture. And for which self am I writing? Myself today? As I think I will be ten years from now? As I hope I will be? For myself as I imagine myself or hope others may imagine me? Questions such as this can and do fill diary writers with anxieties and often enough lead to discontinuation of diaries. The diarist can no longer live with his or her fiction.