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Swinger’s Club
Friday March 19, 2010
The Vienna Secession’s new exhibit of Gustav Klimt’s Beethovenfries strikes me as somewhat apt for the artist, a man whose “Self-Portrait as Genitalia” looks at first glance like a cartoonish satyr stuck to the body of a chicken—but, on closer observation, reveals goateed Klimt with a haunch of engorged testicles and the plumage of an erect penis. Nevertheless, I did not realize....
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In Bed
Thursday March 18, 2010
I stole the title for this posting from Joan Didion. One reason I stole it was that I like the brevity of the phrase: In Bed. There you have two short one-syllable words that share a precision, and the precision they share is this: here, now. And, yes, I stole those two sentences, too, from another essay by Didion, called “Why I Write.” Since I started teaching....
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Help Wanted
Wednesday March 17, 2010
David, my boyfriend, has a master’s degree in philosophy, but the job he held most recently was at Christmas, repackaging Nintendo DS accessories in an unheated warehouse an hour and a half bus ride from home. Before that, he made cold calls for the Muscular Dystrophy Association to local businesses, trying to get their executives to sign up for a fake arrest and “lock-up”....
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Welcome, Memory
Tuesday March 16, 2010
We were having dinner at a friend’s house: a gathering of colleagues enjoying one another’s company with good food, relaxed conversation, a glass of wine. While we spoke of neighborhoods, children, and schools, it dawned on me that my friend, Doug, lived just doors from my grandparents’ old house. My grandparents are now long dead, and they moved from....
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Headphones
Monday March 15, 2010
I would have fallen in love with music in any case, but headphones hastened the process. My aqua transistor radio, a nearly constant childhood companion, was fine as a basic transmitter of tinny, monaural sound. But it was woefully lacking in, shall we say, sonic nuance. And so, early in my high school years....
Artist of the Month
Melissa Pritchard
Melissa Pritchard’s stories often cross an invisible line—between normality, as we usually define it, and, well, the not-normal. The line might be on the border between the erotic and the holy, between wisdom and folly, perhaps even between reality and fiction.
Current Issue
Issue 64
Art by Gerhard Richter, Jeremy Begbie on Orthodoxy, Interview with Les Murray, Fiction by Scott Russell Sanders.
Good Letters: The Image Blog
