That is from ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,’ by Wallace Stevens. Stevens is a poet I’ve returned to recently; I read a lot of his work in college on assignments for classes, but for those assignments, read quickly and cursively. There was also a feeling then, and
I’ve been recently re-reading David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day, a book that my friend Dmitri gave me in Italy two years ago and had me laughing out loud – crying even – on a crowded beach, lots of Italian hunks and hunk-esses disturbed by the barking
Last night, upon seeing the new iPhoto ad on television, Melissa looks over at me and asks, ‘Why don’t we use iPhoto?’
A giant Ferris wheel is being taken down in Paris’s Place de la Concorde after the mayor said it had overstayed its welcome. ‘When I heard it was coming down, I thought it was a pity,’ Elaine Thompson, a British woman who lives in Paris and was walking past
This morning while exiting the subway terminal, a man, well-dressed – to get straight to the point, quite normal-looking – was ascending the stairs next to me. Jamming his way up as quickly as he could, he tripped halfway up the stairs and came too near permanently affixing the middle
I was supposed to have lunch with a friend of my father’s at the Yale Club on Friday; I say supposed because I was turned away – by the coat-check guy – for wearing jeans. Now, I was wearing a tie, jacket, even a shirt with French cuffs, but blue
start blabber: I watched Dog Day Afternoon last night for the first time and have to say I was very impressed; it falls within the late-70s camp of New York films that are well-made, well-written, and bizarrely forgotten by today’s serious directors and writers whose veer
For the second time I spent the first part of a week in D.C. and – for the first time – I rode the Amtrak Acela, perhaps best described as the Eastern seaboard’s very own Bullet Train. My thoughts of the Acela: nice seats, ho-hum lighting, (same) awful food,
A very interesting guide to writing systems, Omniglot; my favorites, for now, are Lontara and Makasar, Gujarti, and Ol’ Reliable Mayan. There is also the numbers 1 to 10 in 4500 languages, grouped by region. Amazing so many languages are still preserved; some countries make this preservation a priority, like
It’s that time of year again, it’s probably sometime this week, and, rest assured, you’re going to make an ass of yourself: the office holiday party. Consider these Office Party Tips from Christmas.com that range from the logical to the ludicrous. For more specialized advice, turn
