The time has come to talk about my favorite novel. In House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski uses the house in the title as a trope for the challenges of written testimony. Here, he has secured himself a space outside of time and narrative from which to survey both. 

Somewhere among the Vietnamese whores, sadistic drill sergeants, and soldiers who know as little about their souls as they do about why they are fighting, there is Full Metal Jacket. From boot camp to battleground, the film explores the contours of degradation, dissolution, and des/

There I am thinking in two directions at once,
trying to find the glasses on my head, spewing mind juice
all over my papers. Yet there must be some grace 
to this unbecoming mambo because I do it daily
in the gleam of the kitchen’s luminous eye.

Oh, lamp, you synthetic, seasonal happiness,&nb

Through the telephone, I hear

our love, a winter orchid,

strange and frozen, so far

from my fingers.

When I speak to you,

the distance suffocates

and the technological longing

ensues.

In verbal embrace,

we hold each other in an echo chamber,

our voices intertwining,

but we

One day I will find
a way to write you,
to make a place in words
that speaks what it is 
that causes you to shine
as if from the beginning of light.

You have entered me, brighter than
the birth of the luminous,
piercing, with quiet claws,
a never-entered space. 

I have in me a universe, and guard
cl/

Those who neither drink nor over-think won't recognize this dance. “What the bloody bleep is this windbag going on about?” they might ask.  But to the thought- and drink-heavy, these Friday night drinking dynamics, this weekend waltz with the bartender, will

Where Are We Now?

Rebels

Redheads

Female cabbies

Flying trapezes

Cartoon characters come to life

Cars driving themselves

Trumpets and horns

Freckles and moles

Monocles on someone besides Mr. Peanut

Talking horses other than Ed

A repository of intellectual provocation 

All

Recently I've become really interested in the concept of cultural curation, or the aggregation of floating, creative tidbits that hover all around us, on the internet and in books, films and mouths.  

Curation, often thought of as the exclusive domain of cultural institutio

Despite the difference in the smell of the night,

this is our typical post-work evening: you sleep while I type,

but in this after-dark, the sight of your sleeping elbow,

hair-kissed, stroked by the last light of 6:30, 

maybe even holy somehow, slays me. 

There are so many things

The first breath I took 

was not air but water.

I was born a fish woman

in the salt of the sea.

My hair was long then,

mouth unfolded as always,

but I did not drown

in my water, my world,

my womb of the sea.

Marc Webb’s “500 Days of Summer” (2009) reveals the anatomy of a failed fantasy. The doomed days of Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel) are presented out of order, yet the trajectory will be all too familiar to any man who has ever had his heart st

Jennifer Burg, Anne Boyle, and Sheau-Dong Lang claim that Faulkner’s stories can leave unseasoned readers with a “jumble of incidents related through the ramblings of memory, but this “jumble is not a flaw in his writing, but rather the way he constructs his characters&rsq

In light of Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are coming out on October 16, let's take a serious look at Sendak's In the Night Kitchen. This strange and wonderful book explores the rich possibilities for identity ex/