Last night I dreamed that a great monster was riding on me and bawling: "Giddup! I am called the Pneumatic Inhaler, did you know? And I adore riding on writers!" I asked him: "You, Sir, are not a publisher or a censor?" I am one of those extinct monsters in Hutchinson's book but--although I am…
“A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.”-Vladimir Nabokov (Laughter in the Dark) It's been one of those crazy semesters--in…
I thought famous people were proud, unapproachable, that they despised the crowd, and by their fame and the glory of their name, as it were, revenged themselves on the vulgar herd for putting rank and wealth above everything. But here they cry and fish, play cards, laugh and get cross like everyone else!-Anton Chekhov (The…
We think we know the ones we love. Our husbands, our wives. We know them--we are them, sometimes; when separated at a party we find ourselves voicing their opinions, their taste in food or books, telling an anecdote that never happened to us but happened to them. We watch their tics of conversation, of driving…
I sometimes wonder, given all the things I have to do on a daily basis, why I keep this blog up. I ask myself some questions, exploring the possibility that I'm perhaps not focusing my energy in the right direction...Should I be dissertating more? Spending more time exercising? Consuming less butter? But then I…
Dining with Dostoevsky 