My family religiously observed the tradition of Sunday dinner (literally, since, as many readers know, family time is a Mormon fetish). Every other week we gathered for the whole evening⎯the grandparents, the siblings, and us, the first cousins. To say the teenaged me took these get-togethers for granted would be a huge understatement, [...]
Author Archive
Popular Songs (Yo La Tengo, Barrymore Theater, Madison, 1/23/10)
My car has a cassette deck but no CD player, so unless I plug the iPod adapter into the cigarette lighter, it’s college mix tapes all the way. Little time capsules that transport me back to the 1990s faster than clove cigarettes or sandalwood oil. They’re full of the usual suspects: Nirvana, [...]
Interstitial
In New York for a few days, and as usual, it’s sensory and emotional overload. Friends I think of every day—but see only once or twice a year—are here in the flesh. We go to amazing restaurants and wander around museums. We gossip and catch up and sit in loving companionable silence. [...]
Bonus playlist Wednesday: Best of 2009 edition
All 72 counties in Wisconsin are officially in a state of emergency. The National Guard is helping people off the highways. A blizzard warning is in effect until midnight tomorrow. We’re getting over a foot of the white stuff. Gusting winds, up to 50 MPH, are expected to cause some crazy-dangerous [...]
The lustre had gone out of her
“And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it⎯a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!” ⎯Virginia Woolf, [...]
In the future, everyone will be John Malkovich for fifteen minutes.
One of the best parts of teaching literature is the vicarious thrill of discovery. After a first encounter, you and I will never be able to read “Sunday Morning” or Angels in America or Gatsby for the first time ever again. Instead, going back to those texts will be like revisiting a beloved foreign [...]
Saturday morning at the Dane County Farmers’ Market
A big guy in a hunter orange boiler suit, bright orange Crocs, and a long white beard plays the piccolo there every week. I call him Prison Santa.
A kid who can’t be more than fifteen or sixteen sits on the curb with a guitar. He seems like just one more embryonic hippie until [...]
