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. The kids are [...]
Author Archive
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 snowdrifts. The governor has [...]
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, Mrs. Dalloway [...]
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 city [...]
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 he [...]
In-body experience
The morning starts with a fluttery feeling in your midsection, somewhere between a stomachache and seeing the object of your junior-high crush in the hallway between classes—excited, but kind of nervous, too. Then the anxiety dissipates until it’s just a low electrical hum buzzing through your limbs, making you want to get up and spaz [...]
Sonic Youth, Turner Hall Ballroom, Milwaukee, 7/20/09
There’s this moment at 4:49 in “Rain On Tin” (from the band’s 2002 album Murray Street) that is simply one of the most gorgeous, joyous, thrilling moments of music I’ve ever heard. Like travelling to a whole new dimension of awesomeness. Seriously, if you listen to it right now, LOUD, your entire life will improve [...]
Bonus playlist Wednesday: dessert edition
(Download Part 1, “Soul Food: dinner edition,” here.) The connection between sweetness and pleasure is part of our evolutionary makeup. Sweet flavors are the first we develop the ability to sense; the message that calorie-rich, life-giving sustenance is on the way floods our brains with dopamine and makes us seek out more sweet flavors, creating [...]
