From EMERGENCY EXIT: Months 5–19 The Stewardess was out of control. She was told when to speak, what to say, what to wear, when to change it, how to stand, where to sit, and how to serve. But she decided whom to service. And she decided how. Four passengers: two men, two women. . . .
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From Tomorrow We Never Did Talk About It: When we left, at the end of the day, the tank was still parked in front of the school. The bus maneuvered through the main gate much more slowly than usual, kind of cautiously, maybe so all of us school kids would be able to . . .
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From Much Ado About Everything: CLEMENT MOTHERS, Sweet Fathers: the Neanderthals laid their dead in graves and covered them with flowers. This is certain, in all the ways that we can approve certainty. It is also possible to think that they sang, wordlessly, and danced, strangely, while they wept. They were, it continues . . .
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From “The Bombay Liaison (is Grateful)”: “They all came to India looking for something. For spirituality. For yoga and fasting. To feed their hunger and thirst with spice and other gastronomic items. Some came for business, cheap shopping, a ten-day wedding. Others came to tick off an item on their bucket list, . . .
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“He’s a sage, a musical holy man, the friend who consoles us when love falters or when we take the wrong path. He’s got a movement behind him, but he’s miles from any phony ideology. He’s simple, transparent, honest, a rebel…” —from Caetano Veloso, Walking into the Wind, nonfiction by Igiaba Scego, translated by Frederika . . .
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Among the many pleasures of Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson is what it gets right about poetry. The film follows its title character, a bus driver in the eponymous New Jersey city, through a week that seems at once typical and catastrophic. Calling man and city by the same name, Jarmusch obviously cites William Carlos Williams, . . .
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Language is alive. Diachronic linguistics has taught us that words often change meaning over time. In a 2014 piece written for TED[1], language historian Anne Curzan notes how words like “nice” and “silly” actually meant the opposite of what they mean in our current usage. Nice meant “silly, foolish, simple,” while silly . . .
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“From the drummer, take the cymbals, the crash, and hi-hatand walk like you’re shining. From the composer take “waterunder snow is wear,” sung by young voices in the timbreof wind blowing through the antlers of reindeer…”–from “What to Take” which appears in the Winter 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 4). Tell us . . .
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“Song is of a squeaky quality, with little or no repetition.It is a poor imitator.Song is a series of evry high, thin, separate, slurred notes.Call is slurred chewink.Song, drink-your-tea…”–from “Bird Song” which appears in the Winter 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 4). Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written When I . . .
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Late in the afternoon of January 13, 1954, less than a year after my marriage to Anne Halley, with a two-month-old son at home in our apartment, I was sitting in my half of an office in Folwell Hall, a teaching assistant at the University of Minnesota, when the phone rang. It . . .
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