Pregnancy, to me, is like holding my breath: the longer it progresses, the harder it is to concentrate on anything besides its eventual end. My son has cropped up at the edge of the bed, one hand curled around the ancient Motorola cell-phone, long dead, that he carries with him everywhere. He is slurping on […]
By the time I publish this post, New York will probably be out of this heat wave, but right now we are in it. The air above the sidewalks shimmers, and the sidewalks have quasi-emptied out. The oldtimers who peddle the wares they find from newercomers’ discard piles have retreated into their favorite bodega; the […]
It is a measure of how swiftly I now fall asleep that I am only eighty percent through The Secret History, which I bought over a week ago and have reading in fevered subway and elevator snatches and those drowsy bedtime minutes ever since. I bought it after reading Esquire’s marvelous, scintillating oral history of […]
Today I came across a list of ways of walking. It’s a vocabulary list, on an Argentinian ESL language site, and its breadth and the generousness of some of its inclusions made me smile. “Mooch,” for example, breaks free the shackles of glommingdom: to mooch is to wander, walk slowly without any purpose. Why, the […]
I’ve been re-re-reading Adam Gopnik’s wonderful memoirs of life as an expat and young father in Paris at the turn of the past century. Oh, the Clinton years (said as a person who experienced them as a child), when America and its capitalist forces were viewed as, ultimately, unstoppable and logical, if a bit gauche. […]
The light, at 6:07, has gone opal, where just last week it was oyster and the week before that, a furry, caterpillar grey. I don’t know if my son notices the difference; he is up at 6, or 6:05, or 6:17 regardless of pitch. Only when it rains does he sleep longer. We all do. […]
A number of threads have been floating around my head of late, and I don’t know whether I’m forcing something by connecting them, but here goes. When I worked in the entertainment division of Conde Nast, the walls of our floor were adorned in machismo inspirational quotes. “Don’t half-ass two things; whole ass one thing” […]
