I don’t leap out rushing into the heat. It’s easier after all to stay put, sitting in the car praying for it to begin moving again. Come on, hold on, breathe.
Nonfiction
Sylvia Ginsberg, Superstar
Grandma Sylvia, complainer or not, seemed to me as worthy of media attention as any TV star, socialite or business mogul in a celebrity-obsessed culture.
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Body Waxing, Lord Byron and the Long Way through Turkey
In a stall in the men’s changing room at the Central London YMCA my challenge has become clear.
The Perimeter Man
Society and the people seem to want to be terminally
‘busy.’ Everyone wants a phone in the car. No one wants
any free-time. The assumption here is that free-time is wasted time,
time better spent getting stuff and getting ahead.
Anorexic, In a Mexican Restaurant
At the Mexican fast-food stand one block from home, I was nine and in line three times a week for a bean and cheese burrito. It was 1975, the year we moved away from my father.
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“So too must we after the manner of lovers give her up”: Plato, Poetry, and the City
If her defence fails, then, my dear friend, like other persons who are enamoured of something, but put a restraint upon themselves when they think their desires opposed to their interests, so too must we after the manner of lovers give her up, though not without a struggle[. . . .] and he who listens [...]
America Doesn’t Order Sausage and Send It Back
Some weeks ago, a friend asked us to come up with a creative way to participate in an anti-Bush rally being held in downtown Missoula. The event, billed simply as “Dump Bush Missoula,” was to be a kind of artsy affair…
The Road to Yountville; or, Confessions of a Common Eater
I went into a fever of hunger for a week, no satisfying it. I didn’t
sleep, I didn’t eat, I wouldn’t talk. I paced the confines
of our cottage with my red pencil, mumbling about marrow and kidneys.
Poetry City
I’m going to talk about not poetry of the city, but poetry as a city. Poetry is a city of words, a complex heterogeneity that functions both as its parts and as a whole. It’s full of systems—metaphoric, symbolic, sonic—analogous to the sewage, electrical, and transportation systems that animate a city. You look at a [...]
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Every Unedited Thing in the Identity Theory Non-Fiction Box Regarding Facial Hair: June 2-Aug 24 (in reverse order)
Hey, Did you shave your facial hair? And if so, were you walking downtown today in a blue shirt, listening to your iPod? I thought I saw you near the Thompson Center. We should get together this weekend if you and Josie are around. I’m going to chad’s friday night and staying through [...]
Mean, Part Three
Wife three: I’m no trophy. I hear phrases like practice makes perfect. Or three is a charm. They’re lying, of course. What they mean is that, if he married again, he’d cross a line. Or they’re sorry for me. Wife one could be naïve. Wife two could be hopeful that wife one was a fluke. [...]
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Mean, Part Two
A woman like that, who covers her legs, likes to hide.
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Searching for Beauty and Bone Structure in “The Swan”
It seems the ideas and actions behind “The Swan” are nothing less than a collaborative art. After all, the simple goal of plastic surgery is to transform the flesh – to literally re-shape it – into forms that are thought to be more aesthetic.
Not Fade Away
An excerpt from the essay collection Bookmark Now by Christian Bauman
Also posted in Essays Tagged Bookmark Now, Christian Bauman, Excerpts, Kevin Smokler, Somalia, War
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Navel Gazing
In early 1999 an album called …Baby One More Time rocketed to number one, powered in part by a music video of 16-year-old Britney Spears performing in the stereotypical costume of a schoolgirl. She was perfectly outfitted in the iconography of the coquette: pleated skirt, kneesocks, pigtails: but the key signifier that positioned her on [...]
Mean
Wife two was a stripper. And sweet, too. He traded her in for me, wife number three. To people I don’t know, I say she was a dancer.
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The Silenced Majority
An excerpt from Amy Goodman’s The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them From The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them by Amy Goodman Published by Hyperion, April 2004 Copyright © 2004 Amy Goodman with David Goodman The [...]
Memo from Bridesmaid #8
Anyway, after a couple of hours
with Stephanie I wanted to shout, “Gin is NOT a fragrance,
you fat ho!” But I didn’t, because after a chat with
my mother in the coat room I realized that it’s not about
me all the time.
Casablanca to Marrakech
Her history’s desert is full of potentates sharpening their swords, inventing icon free art, alphabets, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam and navigation star map tools, breaking wild stallions, building tiled adobe fortresses, selling spices, writing language.
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In the Company of Soldiers
From In the Company of Soldiers by Rick Atkinson Published by Henry Holt; March 2004; $25.00US/$36.95CAN; 0-8050-7561-5 Copyright © 2004 Rick Atkinson They found the sergeant’s body at midmorning on Saturday, April 12, 2003, just where an Iraqi boy had said it would be: in a shallow grave in south Baghdad, near the Highway 8 [...]
Don’t Eat Anything With Bacon
Inmates and their families or loved ones regarding (for the most part) life in, out and around Deerlodge, Montana State Prison. Some quotes are abbreviated. Others are in reference to different prisons in America. But all are genuine. Letters and reports from Prison Talk Online and elsewhere. “i was asking a qustion about my son [...]
No Man’s Land
Barren, fertile, virgin, dry – we speak of our land like a biblical woman. And it’s no mistake. We come from a grand tradition. Gaia, Demeter, Pele and Eve. Primordial women who knew about cycles and passages. Birthing and deathing and intricate dancing between. Myrle Daniels Kilen Salsbury, who took on the name of each [...]
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The Discovered Physician
Before he was text, he was a physician.
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Coprophagy
I had seen a lot at that
point, already, in terms of pornography. Things too numerous to
mention, I suppose, if I think about it. But, I had never seen coprophagy.
The Institutions of American Militarism: An excerpt from Chalmers Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire
I learned, for example, the secret that contrary to all public declarations, President Eisenhower had delegated to major theater commanders the authority to initiate nuclear attacks under certain circumstances, such as outage of communications with Washington — an almost daily occurrence in those days — or presidential incapacitation (twice suffered by President Eisenhower). This delegation [...]
Werewolves and Whooping Birds
Sides of the bed have been established, and it’s me who has the outside while Guess Who snuggles safely in the last-to-die spot by the wall.
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Squirrel
He said he would set a trap for the squirrel and return periodically to check it. "We can’t let him stay out there all night," he said. "He could freeze."
On the Way to CNN (or, Strife During Wartime)
It’s March 2003, and a late snowstorm is capping what was the snowiest winter since 1978 when we were all kids and school closed for a week. I’ve got a wood stove and a novel to write, and I should be sitting in front of the one and working on the other. Instead, I’m in [...]
“The War Prayer” by Mark Twain
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading [...]
From Liberty Cabbage to Freedom Fries
Or: The Ethical Crisis of the Contemporary American Left Like many twenty-something liberals, I suppose, until the fall of 2001 when the advent of the War on Terror put a final end to any lingering vestiges of the Long Boom, my political ethics were largely a matter of faith. Raised by moderate parents and educated [...]
