Hoping you get everything you desire for the holidays.
Archive for the ‘Desire’ category
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, [...]
Full fathom five
Growing up on the coast of southern California, I had a close relationship with tide pools, tracking hermit crabs, sticking my fingers in every anenome, and arranging swirls of shells for classroom projects. Maybe that intimate view of these miniature seas warped my perspective on the ocean, somehow preventing me from looking out and [...]
Bitten
SPOILER ALERT: This post discusses the plot of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.
I highly recommend reading them, rather than reading about them…but I suspect many will not. And let’s start by acknowledging Caitlin Flanagan’s excellent article on female adolescent desire in The Atlantic Monthly. She covers so much, but this is my personal experience of reading [...]
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 [...]
Sontag seminar discussion questions
“Something new each weekday.” To that end, Susan Sontag in Aspen magazine:
Every era has to reinvent the project of “spirituality” for itself. (Spirituality = plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at the resolution of painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.)
In the modern era, one of [...]
April is not the cruelest month…
…March is. Good riddance, I say. As Dave Foley’s character on NewsRadio once remarked, “Winter in Wisconsin is the nicest six months of the year!” (He was being sarcastic, of course—about the nice part, not the six months part, which is all too true.) As I write this, we’re shivering under four [...]
Canadian Gothic
Hugh lived on an enormous wheat and ranching farm in Alberta, Canada, and I lived in Great Falls, Montana. Three hours of wheat-edged and windswept asphalt separated us, with a glowing ember of a border crossing in the middle. Hugh is my cousin, and we were best friends. Each summer either I would head north [...]
Crack House Diary Entry: College Application
This is only a Crackhouse Diary entry in the sense that Susan and I would have never known the author of the following college admission essay had Susan not chosen to teach in a South Central high school. The student, who wishes to remain anonymous, approached Susan for help with her application process. Susan brought [...]
