2023-01-14 01:18
How did silence get such a bad rap? Everybody these days things the world of their own voice, things that by raising that voice, they're doing something. Wrong. Nobody except you cares what… Read More
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Inky and tentacled
2023-01-13 05:10
I was engrossed by what I'd underlined. I read entire pages, struggling to recall the year I'd devoted to this book or that (1958, 1960, 1962, before marriage, after?). It wasn't the written… Read More
2022-11-18 17:40
It's so much easier to know what Hashem wants for a man: not to be a woman. Unlike the blessing women say, in small print, the men's blessing appears in the regular, large typeface of the pr… Read More
2022-11-16 05:20
Whenever dawn caught him in motion, Gonzalo tended to feel like there was some kind of link between the birth of the light and the very fact of moving forward, as if the walker were somehow… Read More
2022-10-14 13:03
I could only see a small patch of sky, the part that was left open between the treetops of the forest around me. The branches seemed like a network that in some places almost obscured the sk… Read More
2022-09-19 03:38
"In Japan, they say that when you can't sleep, you must be awake in someone else's dream."Who is dreaming about me every night? Perhaps it is several people in rotation. Do they queue up to… Read More
2022-07-27 12:58
But how does a person learn to see herself as nothing when she has already had so much trouble learning to see herself as something in the first place? [...] You have been a negative nothing… Read More
2022-06-30 20:43
The other evening I sit with a friend on his balcony having a glass of wine and sharing insights into our hearts and brains and those of our lovers and those whom we'd like to have as our lo… Read More
2022-06-25 15:18
A forest floor, the Woodland villagers knew, is a living thing. Vast civilizations lay within the mosaic of dirt: hymenopteran labyrinths, rodential panic rooms, life-giving airways sculpted… Read More
2022-06-21 15:17
In this humid, rusty place where women congregate, naked and wet, where they show each other scars beside their breasts and on the bellies, the bruises on their thighs, the imperfections on… Read More
2022-06-20 03:24
They say travel leads to the realization that one does not in fact exist.So starts an auction lot description of resurfaced possessions and miscellaneous articles. Another lot of Amelia Earh… Read More
2022-06-11 14:48
Dear Diary, It's been seven weeks since my last confession. I feel spent. Everything is good, but nothing is right.Once swallowed the piece of paper lodges in her oesophagus near her heart… Read More
2022-04-23 15:03
geraldI know I've been using a lot of WFH time but I checked with our ops team — technically there isn't a set limit on how much you can takedoug smorin"within reason" is the limitgera… Read More
2022-04-02 19:15
"You're trying to get away? It's no use! I too was trying to get away, to ride away, to move to Lviv, or to Kyiv, to anywhere else. But you can't get away. There's a moment when cars stop dr… Read More
2022-03-31 03:50
If each of us drew our own body as if by dictation from our own internal perspective, we would produce a gallery of monsters!— from The Sexual Life of Catherine M., by Catherine M… Read More
2022-03-26 18:34
I'd gone to France for work, to a party, in a castle decked out in a way I'd never seen. I'd had a fair amount to drink, and I latched onto someone who worked for an important newspaper, unl… Read More
2022-03-20 22:46
My adolescence as a reader became, without a break, a long and unhappy apprenticeship as an author.The geese have returned. They've brought the rains. I am living amid a labyrinth of bo… Read More
2022-03-14 03:26
It was her Father who told her that highly educated people did nothing but complain, and that those in poverty, on the other hand, could stand more, much more, or maybe they felt less. He al… Read More
2022-03-03 05:28
Sprawled across Jackson Ave is a larger-than-life lady, screaming her "I don't give a fuck" in chemical pink. We come up on her from behind; a slight torque in her repose, I can't see her ha… Read More
2022-02-10 03:34
Clara's body heaved a little, assuming the shape of a soundless sigh. Currents of emotion moved through the room.My mother moved us to a subdivision when I was 11, a year or two before Rush… Read More
2022-01-26 03:34
Sensei continued to stare at my arm, all the way down to my palm. His eyes on my palm, he murmured something about me not having any wit lines, even though I had several affair lines. The ve… Read More
2022-01-24 13:50
Our love was so strong that it felt like a presence in the communal apartment, as if it were another tenant. It had an amorphous shape and weird density; it was less dense than an actual obj… Read More
2022-01-09 16:56
The other night I dream I am in Mexico again, but on the mainland, gently drifting, grazing the treetops. I think I am holding something over my head, maybe a sheet, acting like a glider. I… Read More
2021-12-30 16:55
The sense of space as a controlled substance is overpowering, except you don't know where it's going to take you.The Silk Road is magic. I don't understand how any of it works, and I'm sure… Read More
2021-12-27 22:33
"People want conjugal love, Rachel, because it brings them well-being, a certain peace. It's a predictable love since they expect it, and they expect it for precise reasons. A bit boring, li… Read More
2021-12-16 15:12
"I will never do that again," she said. "Be the one who loves less."26 Knots, by Bindu Suresh, is a love story, is several love stories, several different kinds of love, wrenched by obsessio… Read More
2021-12-02 04:15
I remember what's not here. An island of men who are searching for beauty and find it only in the vastness of confinement. I admit I'm sadistic. I'm always saying that nothing is possible wi… Read More
2021-11-28 02:44
I was tipsy, yes, but also I was grace itself. There is, below the surface of every conversation in which intimacies are shared, an erotic current. Sometime this current is so hot it all but… Read More
2021-11-22 19:02
On the platform of a train station, late morning, early June: two women embracing after a separation of several months. Behind them, a tall fair-haired man alighting from the train carrying… Read More
2021-11-10 04:07
Who even gets married? said Bobbi. It's sinister. Who wants state apparatuses sustaining their relationship?I don't know. What is ours sustained by?That's it! That's exactly what I mean. Not… Read More
2021-11-05 22:33
We always realize things afterwards. Loneliness, for example. It's not when we think we're alone, or when we feel abandoned. That's something different. Loneliness is invisible, we go throug… Read More
2021-10-25 10:59
In person, they baffled me even more. People without hope require direction, according to Dyson. But this wasn't what hopelessness looked like. I had seen hopelessness before, in messages fr… Read More
2021-10-19 03:52
Anyone who takes gentle care of a cow is someone I trust. It's a more telling characteristic of a person than taking Communion. Certainly more telling than good teeth.I wanted to like this b… Read More
2021-10-17 11:21
"Why is this your life? Why are you not a truck driver in Norway? Why?"I have recovered from the sickness. I continue to feel tired, but it is a familiar languishing, not the fatigue of phys… Read More
2021-10-06 02:44
Though provincial by birth, we all considered ourselves the most cultured teenagers in our town, the ones refined enough to be embarrassed by our provincialism and desperate for more civiliz… Read More
2021-10-03 17:41
"Sad sells." This might sound sadistic but it's true; people want to see their sadness reflected back at them because it makes them feel connected to something and connection is the best sal… Read More
2021-10-01 15:01
One day, the past calls you up on the phone and you drop everything and go to Bosnia, because your childhood friend's brother who's been missing since the war shows up. (The plot of Catch th… Read More
2021-09-25 20:45
There's a Jewish joke that says God often rereads the Torah to try to understand what's going on in this world he created.On the 561st day of German lessons, the sickness finally comes. It a… Read More
2021-09-15 03:22
If faced with a rock, for instance, one should stare deep into the place where its rockness begins to form. Then the observer should keep looking until his own center starts to sink with the… Read More
2021-09-08 03:34
The pills flatten me, make me into a thin scum on the surface of still water. I don't sink. Coast instead, detached from the world around me, and I'm fine with it. Time is water, and the wee… Read More
2021-08-26 17:11
Άδάμας (Unconquerable), by Sophia Wallace, 2013.Desire, for women, can be complicated. While men are generally allowed to want openly, to covet pleasure openl… Read More
2021-08-22 17:35
I'm humming a little. Softly. Just to myself. A tune I heard somewhere, can't remember where from, but it's lovely. It comes easily to my lips, and I don't usually sing. My lips are usually… Read More
2021-08-15 13:22
Above us Tyll Ulenspiegel turned, slowly and carelessly — not like someone in danger but like someone looking around with curiosity. He stood with right foot lengthwise on the rope, hi… Read More
2021-08-08 21:43
It is a fact, though, that for some time now I have known about life. As for love, on that score there is not only no illusion left in me, but also no desire for illusions, no urge to try to… Read More
2021-08-01 18:29
"I will submit to you today that logic is indeed sexy. Logic is fact in a world of fiction, truth in a society of lies, and light in the shadows. Logic will never betray you, deceive you, or… Read More
2021-07-31 16:01
I indulged in the luxury of wandering through a bookstore the other day, hoping, as I do, that some miraculous book would stop me in my tracks and beg to come home with me. And so this brigh… Read More
2021-07-22 13:31
The last day of summer is misty and smells like fermented blackberry juice, and it sticks to me and makes me gag. I sit in my room in the attic and try to read what I've been assigned. Brief… Read More
2021-07-19 12:47
The fragrance in the room has four hearts. None of these hearts is human, and that's why I'm drawn towards them. At the base of this fragrance is soil and oakmoss, incense, and the smell of… Read More
2021-07-12 12:21
"A computer is only human," he used to say. "It, too, can break down."He cancels our meeting at the eleventh hour. I am unlikely to sit on a terrasse in the midday sun drinking orange beer… Read More
2021-07-11 15:09
César Aira, waits for his issues of Artforum to arrive. Eventually (but this happened years ago: I am trying to recover a memory that I've half lost along the bumpy trajectory of… Read More
2021-07-08 13:14
Ellie swam up to me. "Hey," she whispered, cupping her hand under my head and lifting it so I could hear her. "I was thinking about how, in the mystical Jewish tradition, reading histories t… Read More
2021-07-05 02:40
Vernon Subutex, by Virginie Despentes, is a chaotic canvas of characters all falling into orbit around a new messiah. Convoluted as life itself."Don't worry, I don't want to be a burden, hon… Read More
2021-06-30 15:50
The Divorce, by César Aira, is not about a divorce. This realization came as a minor disappointment, as a divorce story stumbled upon in a village bookshop during a weekend getaw… Read More
2021-06-29 18:02
Caissa, the muse of chess, was no less ruthless than the muse of poetry. Muses had a way of killing those whom they inspired.The Eight, by Katherine Neville, originally published in 1988, is… Read More
2021-06-16 11:35
Priestesses smelled like forbearance and cheap incense, not raw earth and full bellies.When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain is an exquisite thing, the second book in the Singing Hills Cycle… Read More
2021-06-11 12:08
The Ancestry of Objects, by Tatiana Ryckman, tells the story of a woman having an affair with a married man.We lean against the counter and leak onto the linoleum floor. We think of the stai… Read More
2021-05-31 12:26
"What's your passion?" How I hate that question. Passionately. It's a phrase that gained traction over the last couple decades or so. (Is Oprah to blame?) We used to talk about hobbies… Read More
2021-05-28 20:41
Guided meditation this week reminds me: Your heart is devoted to your existence.Today, after five months, curfew is lifted. Tonight I think I'll take a midnight walk.It's been 450 straight d… Read More
2021-05-26 13:36
It is not difficult to fall in love. First her eyes staring at him last night, her youth and that faint impudence — nothing vulgar, just enough to pique his curiosity. Then there is th… Read More
2021-05-24 13:26
"The human being is the cause of all evil in this world. We are our own virus."Tender. One who tends. Legal tender. My heart is tender (loving, affectionate, but possibly compassionate, youn… Read More
2021-05-15 13:01
Trust your hands. Your fingers know things. You have touched faces. You have touched children and lovers. Your fingers remember.That was the first lesson. The first lesson is always one of t… Read More
2021-05-12 01:05
I considered the possibility that art — not just L's art but the whole notion of art — might itself be a serpent, whispering in our ears, sapping away all our satisfaction a… Read More
2021-05-06 15:16
Do trees exist?entry for the nineteenth day of the fifth month in the year the albatross came the the south-western hallsMany things are unknown. Once — it was about six or seven month… Read More
2021-05-04 09:55
We humans are, in the end, stupid creatures who cannot help desiring that someone know us as we are. Our first night together, we made love for endless hours. The hallways creaked with… Read More
2021-05-01 14:59
Accuracy above all things. You will never remember the great if you do not remember the small.The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo, is a beautiful piece of storytelling as old woman R… Read More
2021-04-29 15:50
Pleasure taken alone can be told, pleasure taken with another is elusive.This week, I received an unsolicited review copy of a novel in the mail — The Heart Remembers, it's called. Thi… Read More
2021-04-26 13:04
The Other believes that there is a Great and Secret Knowledge hidden somewhere in the World that will grant us enormous powers once we have discovered it. What this Knowledge consists of he… Read More
2021-04-22 22:59
I think it is possible to track the onset of middle age exactly. It is the moment when you examine your life and instead of a field of possibility opening out, an increase in scope, you have… Read More
2021-04-13 04:12
Here’s the thing: Words arrive rowdily, with all their luggage and definitions. Words that are both what they say they are, and how they say it. Words always arrive a little too late… Read More
2021-04-01 12:46
He realized what had been disturbing him about her. With other women whom he had been with in similar situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness within them that had made i… Read More
2021-03-26 17:39
Some ways of seeing women and their sexuality and way of being in the world, as expressed by John Berger in his novel G. ...On physical sensitivity:When Laura was a small child she real… Read More
2021-03-23 11:34
He believed that Nietzsche, he said presently, had taken for his motto a phrase of Pindar's: become what you are. [...] If he understood me correctly, I ascribed to outside factors the capac… Read More
2021-03-20 03:14
Hygiene's not a major concern of mine. At some point I realized that boys and girls are taught differently about how to keep their intimate regions clean. My mother placed great importa… Read More
2021-03-17 12:25
The artist Louise Bourgeois, for example, was suddenly all the rage in her last years and finally allowed to come out of the closet and be seen, when her male counterparts had been on the pu… Read More
2021-03-17 02:28
A new edition of The Hearing Trumpet, by Leonora Carrington, is out from NYRB Classics, featuring an afterword by Olga Tokarczuk. I'm delighted to discover what I assume to be that afterword… Read More
2021-03-13 14:14
The ink and the blood in the turquoise water: these are the colors inside the fucking.Is blue the color of hope or of despair?Bluets, by Maggie Nelson, is an investigation into the colour bl… Read More
2021-03-11 13:03
On my CV it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel "in progr… Read More
2021-03-07 13:27
August. Two-thirty in the afternoon. Everything before our eyes burned white, and the sky was a perfect blue over the buildings, the total blue of a computer screen. Everything was shining i… Read More
2021-02-26 17:16
(Passion must hurl itself against time. Lovers fuck time together so that it opens, advances, withdraws upon itself and bends backwards. Time which their hearts pump. Time whose vagina is mo… Read More
2021-02-18 18:50
The creative energy seems to be related to that gushing of emotional force slightly diverted by a soothing hand. reassurance of the right kind. That reassurance which transforms the hate int… Read More
2021-02-09 13:42
So much profundity:"To look is an act of choice." "To touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it.""Fear of the present leads to mystification of the past." (This one needs unpac… Read More
2021-02-03 05:27
"Gawd, mom," says the girl. "You're such a nerd." She's wide-eyed as I giddily skim the hardcopy course notes she just picked up at the college bookstore. The Hollow Men!, I exclaim, and off… Read More
2021-01-30 18:17
For an entire year I spent my allowance on expensive medical books, while my friends all spent theirs on drugs. Nothing brought me as much happiness as those books. All those beautiful medic… Read More
2021-01-28 03:14
We are so schooled, he said, in the doctrine of self-acceptance that the idea of refusing to accept yourself becomes quite radical.I don't know what it is about Rachel Cusk's Transit that ma… Read More
2021-01-19 13:59
I approached the beautiful woman, who had never looked so seductive as today in her cruelty, in her scorn."Another step," Wanda ordered. "Kneel down and kiss my foot."She stretched her foot… Read More
2021-01-10 18:13
Curfew starts tonight. The province-wide reminder alert prompts me to make my way home.Helicopters circle overhead.At 7:36 pm, a man sits by himself at the picnic table. I hear the faint str… Read More
2021-01-06 04:16
This is what fascinates me: not writing as art, I've spent my whole adult life trying to understand that, never figuring out what it is, for that I'm too primitive or inadequate to understan… Read More
2021-01-01 18:49
[Why do I look for signs? To be pointed in the right direction.Why do I recognize some signs and not others? It must be because I already know where I want to go.]One of the fist recent sign… Read More
2020-12-27 01:13
Here are some amazing passages from J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories. Full portraits in miniature. This is a masterclass not only in crafting sentences, but in perceiving the true marks of chara… Read More
2020-12-18 18:25
"Find your place... and wait."Zgubiona Dusza, written by Olga Tokarczuk and illustrated by Joanna Concejo, will be available in English as The Lost Soul, translated by Antonia… Read More
2020-12-15 12:39
It is a kind of miracle whenever we meet anyone who truly moves us. We don't meet many of these people in one lifetime — the people who lead us forward.(Oh, but when we do...)The Schr… Read More
2020-12-10 22:22
I'm good at beginnings. I've had millions of them. Beginnings are easy. Practice makes perfect. And most of them have had endings. Endings are often brought about by circumstances outsi… Read More
2020-12-08 13:43
Stamped on a poster next to the book is the face of a handsome man, too handsome, maybe: tousled hair, a weather-scarred complexion, melancholy eyes, a cigarette tucked between his fingers.I… Read More
2020-12-04 02:43
There's something frustrating about Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam. It's so compulsively readable, so well blurbed and generally highly regarded, so polished — it left me… Read More
2020-11-28 16:06
Without agreeing to do so, we made it a thing not to call anything by its name, not to talk of cocks and vaginas and not to make love the way we had both been taught. Making love is such a s… Read More
2020-11-26 04:19
The time of my adolescence is slow, made up of large gray blocks and sudden humps of color, green or red or purple. The blocks don't have hours, days, months, years, and the seasons are inde… Read More
2020-11-21 20:22
I wondered whether, if I spent long enough with it, the machine would distill the essence of my work out of me the way I had never quite managed for myself. And if it could, was that a perfe… Read More
2020-11-19 15:24
The mushrooms glowed brighter, and she thought perhaps later she might touch them, running her hands against the wall and settling her face against the softness of their flesh. It would be g… Read More
2020-11-14 21:18
2020-11-14 03:41
I didn't know I needed to read this book. Three, by D.A. Mishani, was the perfect antidote to what had been a disappointing reading week (Kraft and Mexican Gothic, which are both excellent b… Read More
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