A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness— O, Wilderness were Paradise enow! —from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, trans. Edward Fitzgerald I sat on the floor of my boyfriend’s apartment in Chicago this morning listening to the Dixie Chicks sing…

Two nights a week, I tutor students in the college’s writing center. Inevitably we have nights with no appointments, and the other tutors, also students, do their homework and monitor Texts from Last Night and Facebook. And we talk. We talk a lot about my pregnancy, probably too much, as they’ve come to refer to…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

I can tell that a novel is top-rate when I start praying for the characters. And when, on finishing the book, I sit immobilized, loathe to break the spell of the world it has brought me into. A world drawn from our own but given a shape and meaning that allows us to see something…

I knew that there was rock music in China, and I was determined to get as involved in it as I could—which turned out to be not very much, since I have the Chinese vocabulary of a three-year-old child. It doesn’t help that Chinese people are, as a rule, very polite and complimentary to foreigners,…

Lent is upon us. If you want to make an Orthodox Christian commit the sin of pride (and thus, in theory at least, to have to go to Confession), then mention how hard it is to remember your decision to “give up” chocolate, or to complain about having to eat fish on Fridays during Lent.…

Lent is upon us. If you want to make an Orthodox Christian commit the sin of pride (and thus, in theory at least, to have to go to Confession), then mention how hard it is to remember your decision to “give up” chocolate, or to complain about having to eat fish on Fridays during Lent.…