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 [...]
Archive for the ‘Words’ category
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 city [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
End of summer reviews
A few of the diversions I’ve enjoyed this summer: Books: The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University, by Kevin Roose. A 19-year-old sophomore at Brown University decides to spend a semester studying at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Among other things, he gets in the habit of praying multiple times [...]
Late Summer
The sun is high and bright. Back in Saskatchewan, the fields are a burning gold, the skies unending in their pale blue, and the heat constant. At night, lightning storms fill the entire sky, or more often the heavens clear to a rich darkness with its ten thousand thousand stars. It’s strange how much I [...]
