Relationships

I meet the artist, who does x, for a snack one afternoon. We have the kind of conversation it was more necessary to have previous to the existence of the Internet. We exchange general info about the world. 

We went into the garden to pick out a poison blocker / We saw fish mint / A lizard’s tail / A chameleon plant / Your heartleaf / My fishwort

Writing as an intransitive catastrophe and the hyperbole of literature.

I was the type of man who got his ears cleaned. I was the type of woman who didn’t like dogs. We lived together in a house on a street that was the color of asphalt. I told you what I thought of you.

February 1 marked the centenary of Muriel Spark’s birth, and we’re celebrating with a selection of the British master’s aphorisms, notes, and observations.

I just said I didn’t know / and now you are saying / you aren’t sure I’m cool / that’s cool

Four generations of unhappiness populate the French auteur’s latest.

Filled with hairspray and dog-smoke / and cigarette meat / at the meeting  in the big town-hall / of the small provincial town of / sleep       

The novelists on Vietnam, Norman Mailer, and the dragon’s perspective.

I say something about the time and he replies, “I cannot sleep in this lifeless room, I can’t, I can’t. I won’t. You can’t make me.”

Sexual panic in South Brooklyn

I tried Al on like a suit and he didn’t fit. In the crotch area, excess fabric hung loose, like disappointment.

Everybody assumes I’m one or the other, at first. Sometimes it becomes a game, a mental tally of points in each column, trying to prove the original guess.

Reliable uncertainty in Deb Olin Unferth’s Wait Till You See Me Dance

Distance and searching in Katie Kitamura’s A Separation

Friendship and the lies we tell ourselves in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time.

Lucy and Kit sat waiting side by side on a black leather couch, before a long glass window that looked out over Tribeca, the winter sun in their laps. Kit stole sideward glances at Lucy, who hummed, twisting her hair around her fingers in a compulsive fashion.

Around this time I became a frequent visitor to a sex-ad bulletin board. Real-life meetups were the focal point. 

“She’ll be like an apple tree among all the ash-colored buildings of that granite city.”

4 June 2010, Edinburgh. The brightness of the morning. Sky flat. No clouds. When he came into her room with coffee she was already awake.