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Like Fire
When Russian writers come up in conversation, as they are wont to, you can always count on someone—or an entire chorus—admitting to huge gaps in their reading and confiding that they really need to address the situation. I know because I’m one of them. I fully intend to read War and Peace and Anna Karenina [...]
Read MoreChange was the watchword for these several recent days. Well, when is change ever not the way things are? It never ends. And so, I take great comfort from the three stanzas of Joyce Sutphen’s poem, Living in the Body, which parallel news and views that have been shared with me lately: Body is something [...]
Read MoreWell, OK. It was Valentine’s Day. But I’m not going to feel too bad about missing most of it because I’m fully with Lorenz Hart on this one: Each day is Valentine’s Day. And that goes in both directions: If you have someone you love and cherish, no need to set aside one particular day [...]
Read MoreThis day is full of bulletins / pungent with warnings / turgid with urgency. Even the normally tranquil Oxford English Dictionary defines blizzard as “A furious blast of frost-wind and blinding snow, in which man and beast frequently perish”. Yikes. In the interest of safety, then, I am jumping offline and fleeing homeward to my [...]
Read MoreLooks like we’re going to get a little weather here on the east coast this weekend. Which doesn’t sound too distressing, honestly… there’s a bag and a half of rock salt in the garage, we had the roof patched this past fall, and—that ageless refrain—I have plenty to read. Granted, much of it is required, [...]
Read MoreThe only trouble about this town is, that it is too large. You cannot accomplish anything in the way of business, you cannot even pay a friendly call, without devoting a whole day to it—that is, what people call a whole day who do not get up early. Many business men only give audience from [...]
Read MoreIt has been more than thirty concentric rings ago, but I remember the phrase very clearly. One of my professors, during an annual evaluation, offered a cleverly thesauric observation about my youthful demeanor and collegiate presence: “[he] tends to be wooden.” Even allowing for my customary quiet nature, youthful immaturity, and a somewhat tamped-down personality, [...]
Read MoreA Short History of Women Kate Walbert Scribner, 2009 Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women was one of the ten best books of 2009, according to the New York Times. It’s easy to see how this story of women, all dealing with quintessential “women’s issues” through five generations of the same family, might impress [...]
Read MoreIf you were anywhere near the Internet yesterday, you probably know that it was the 200th anniversary of the debut of Pride and Prejudice. To which we say, Yay Jane! Two centuries of continuous publication is nothing to sneeze at, and the fact that the novel’s commentary on class, marriage, money, and perception still holds [...]
Read MoreAt the very beginning of her sensibly provocative guide, The Writing Life, Annie Dillard describes the process: When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. … You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the [...]
Read MoreChange is good. Not the bad kind, obviously, but we can just go ahead and call that trauma or difficult life transitions or Mercury in retrograde. Change is good when you empty out your pockets every night and put it in a jar; change is good when you do it to babies; and change is [...]
Read MoreWithin the curiosity shop that is the January/February issue of The Atlantic (anesthesia, online dating, bad-boy bankers, the Cuban Missile Crisis, whiskey micro-distillers) is a single poem — “Orient” by Billy Collins, one of America’s marquee poets. Many images came to mind as I read and reread this lovely and spare piece. The first lines [...]
Read MoreTwo of my favorite shortlists, the National Book Critics Circle and The Story Prize, were announced this week, and there are some really choice picks among them. Oh, I know, I say that every year. Maybe they just look extra good right now because I haven’t read many of the books in question. Even the [...]
Read MoreThis week has been all about spawning items for my to-do list rather than, say, actually doing them — a time of conception rather than of delivery. The peculiar rhythms of the ‘holiday season’ having ended, the momentum of the routine came roaring back. By Tuesday morning, I had mostly stopped completing tasks (except for [...]
Read MoreSometime last autumn, in an effort to combine a needed moment of retail therapy with some eventual ‘me time’, I entered for myself a new subscription to Poetry magazine, the one-hundred-year-old gem that comes forth from The Poetry Foundation in Chicago. At the time, I gave little thought to how I would make use of [...]
Read MoreAll right, I realize that talking about last year’s books is so… 2012. But I could never quite see the point of making a year’s “best of” list in the middle of December—did we not all have a holiday coming up that often involved travel, or enforced downtime, or family who needed to be tactfully [...]
Read MoreThis is the season of the balance sheet. I don’t mean the kind where you tabulate all your shining moments and painful shortcomings—we still have a few days left before you need to get that maudlin—but rather the post-holiday period when you finally get a good sense of how many people gave you gifts for [...]
Read MoreBack in the heat of the dog days, our roving correspondent Dena Santoro reported on finding an 1875 copy of The Language of Flowers in a London bookshop in 1988. And here, as a gift to all you fine folks who have stuck by Like Fire throughout the year, is her limited holiday edition, updated [...]
Read MoreA Song On the End of the World Czeslaw Milosz (translated by Anthony Milosz) On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net. Happy porpoises jump in the sea, By the rainspout young sparrows are playing And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be. On [...]
Read MoreAll right, here comes the extra-long holiday weekend! Full of festive fun, family, and friends… or a host of other F-words: fatigued, forlorn, fractious. Maybe it’s just a blessed break from work or school. Or maybe you are working, either because you’re indispensable or just happy to take the overtime when things are quiet. Maybe [...]
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