I’ve lived in my current apartment for more than six years, and for five of those years I’ve lived in the room that has roof access. This has translated to: various handymen, roofers, and landlords crawling in and out of my window when there’s a hole or a leak or an air conditioner problem (not that we have central air conditioning…the store downstairs holds that honor). For a while there was a roofer named Willy who consistently called me before… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Blog
Books that made me want to go to ________ // 02
American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett made me want to go to the American Southwest, New Mexico in particular. The novel is classified as literature, horror, fantasy, and science fiction depending on where you look…so it’s none or all, basically. Reading it made me realize that as far as science fiction or literary fiction with a science fiction bent (but not wanting this to be a post about genres, categorization, or what’s “literary”…) goes, I prefer to read about very old… Read more »
Olympic Dreams
…no, not that kind. I haven’t had those since I was maybe seven and realized I was never going to be an elite gymnast (yes, it was that obvious even then). I mean LITERAL dreams. Three, at this point, which means…enough for a LIST: Several weeks ago I had a dream that Simone Biles was up on vault–it was hazy as to whether this was team or all-around finals–and that when she ran down the vaulting runway her steps were… Read more »
Olympic Thoughts, Days 6-8
Gymnastics: What’s more exciting–utter domination or the slimmest of margins among competitors? BOTH, of course. Unsurprisingly, Simone Biles utterly dominated the women’s all-around final, but her male counterpart, Kohei, was part of a men’s all-around that managed simultaneous total domination–from 1. Kohei, winning his second Olympic all-around gold (he also won silver AA when he was 19 in Beijing) and capping off eight years of beating everyone all of the time, to 2. Oleg Vernaiev absolutely catching up to him… Read more »
Olympic thoughts, Day 4
Swimming I love watching track because you can see the athletes’ faces and they look, well, much more visibly human than the swimmers, who resemble graceful aquatic mammals until they win, take off their caps, and suddenly it’s not a manatee or Aquaman but instead a large British child. That said, I fully love these swimming commentators. They sound like they’re having the GREATEST time and their pitch and speed increases so dramatically at the end of every race. And… Read more »
Olympic thoughts, Day 3
Gymnastics Rebecca Andrade’s floor music seems to be a Beyonce medley. Well, not seems: is. The availability of live streams for qualifying rounds is <choose one of the following cliches> an embarrassment of riches, a mixed blessing, likely to reduce both my socialization and my iPhone step count for the next few days. Yesterday I watched men flip for about 5 hours, mostly while I was soaking my foot in a tub of water because I inexplicably ground some glass… Read more »
Books that made me want to go to ________ // 01
Waterland by Graham Swift made me want to go to the fens, the flattest parts of East Anglia in England. The book didn’t make them sound particularly uplifting or physically beautiful, but it did make them sound magical. I read this book my senior year of high school and my English teacher told us that there was a famous writing program there, and that there was speculation that the flatness of the land (see also The Iowa Writers Workshop) had a role… Read more »
The Olympics
I’ll start by saying that I once climbed halfway up Mt. Olympus in an epic day/night that started in a grove of fig trees, traversed mountain, beach, and highway, and ended in a Greek heavy metal bar. But that…contained very few feats of athleticism, unless you count the record-setting number of cups and plates I broke the next morning while trying to wash the dishes. It feels gauche, or perhaps well beyond that, given the human rights violations, corruption, pollution, doping, and… Read more »
Queries
I used to read various slush piles in several past lives, and I kept a running list of some of the more memorable opening lines, final enjoinders, or premises for novels/books of nonfiction/short stories. (There used to be/still is an archive of an anonymous tumbler along these lines–though no longer active, it’s still funny: http://slushpilehell.tumblr.com/) Some people had questions or proposals for me: “Have you ever seen a book for lay adults about the human colon?” “We are in the… Read more »
Oddments
Things I can never keep straight in my head: Complementary vs supplementary Inductive vs deductive Miss America vs Miss USA Song lyrics by the opening act of a show I went to a few weeks ago: “I am sensation. You are sensation. We are sensation…” (and so on…) They later sang a song whose primary lyrics were “Who am I? Who am I?” Hello, you’re sensation. I like the conjugation of a verb as the primary basis for an… Read more »
