Category: Memory

  • More like a particle or more like a wave

    More like a particle or more like a wave

    The French anthropologist Nastassja Martin described her encounter with a camchatma brown bear in the Siberian wilderness as: “A meeting, an implosion of boundaries, a melding of forms.” The moments she spent within the bear’s jaws, she writes, were “intimate beyond anything I could have imagined.”  The experience cost Martin much of her face.  A…

  • Put the circle back

    Put the circle back

    I was in New York this week; I had gone for a run along the Hudson, a run in which I surprised myself by holding onto a sub-8 minute pace for eight miles, double the distance I’d done since my aborted half-marathon training last fall; I was hobbling into the dim lobby of the hotel,…

  • It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead.

    It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead.

    Brady said we ought to keep a journal of this time, so when people ask, ten or thirty or fifty years from now, “what was it like,” we’ll be able to say: it was like [x].  Assume a susceptibility rate of y, and a transmission rate of n. Solve for x.  It was like the…

  • How to Save a Lie

    What would you do if your son was at home/ Crying alone/ On the bathroom floor/ ‘Cause he’s hungry and the only way to feed him is to/ Sleep with a man for a little bit of money? Our eighth grade art class had been tasked with creating CD jackets to songs or albums we…

  • This Is Not Simone de Beauvoir

    an (non) Actor’s Lament “He stole my scarab beetle!” I mumbled. “No, no, no. Again, stronger please.” Each shake of Professor C’s shaggy head was rife with that combination of exasperation and despair so particular to the French. “He STOLE my scarab beetle!” Professor C sighed. I was supposed to be furious, yes? So, where…