About a week ago my mother was hospitalized after a rare reaction to the antibiotics she was given for pneumonia which caused her lungs to seize and interrupted her breathing. She was shopping with a friend of hers when she collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital. Thankfully she’s making a full [...]
Archive for the ‘Words’ category
The Intersection of Small Things
I like unexpected patterns, the ways in which seemingly unrelated threads might find themselves woven together. There’s a beauty in the small details. In the ways in which one thing informs another. Sometimes through sound. Sometimes through history. The mind forms associations, building both practical and improbable bridges, linking words and elements of the world. [...]
Watching Rambo for the Holidays, Thinking of Home
I confess. I spent a day and a half watching all four Rambo movies back to back. I’m not quite certain what compelled me to start this process, but having started, I ended up sitting through the entire saga of blazing guns, gigantic explosions, over-the-top 80s patriotism, and the ever-ubiquitous bloodsplatter as Rambo does another [...]
Budding
I’m a recent convert to Mortified!—the performance initiative that presents people reading from their original teenage journals, letters, poems, stories and other angst-ridden and embarrassing adolescent material. Check out their website to find performances in your area.
The evening was brilliant. Jon Stewart could not have made me laugh and cry more than the geeky highschooler [...]
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, [...]
Music, Weightlessness, and the Waking Dream
I used to wake every morning to soundtrack of Gattaca on my cd-player/alarm clock. The incessant call in the music evoked something both melancholy and haunting. The dark tones of the string instruments resonated with something deep inside me, striking some blend of longing and worry, as if I weren’t quite certain where or who [...]
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 [...]
Stella investigates: the death of the newspaper and the future of journalism
Stella sat down with a nationally-acclaimed journalist to talk about the decline of the newspaper industry and the future of the craft.
I cancelled my subscription to The Washington Post earlier this year.
That makes me feel disappointed.
What are you reading?
I get the Post. I read less than I used to because I read most of [...]
The Beautiful Glimpsed in Unexpected Places
People give me a strange look sometimes when I tell them that I used to be a computer games programmer. The idea that a poet might have a technical background seems odd at first — in large measure because we’ve been brought up to believe that there is a great divide between the sciences and [...]
