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.
Essays
Creative nonfiction essays
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.
“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 …
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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.
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.
Mean, Part Two
A woman like that, who covers her legs, likes to hide.