Category: writing

My imagination failed. I got all enmeshed in what was realism and what was reality and what was true—my need not be int that place—and my imagination failed. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.

But aren’t all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos—we know what’s out there. It’s what isn’t that truly compels us. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet lags—four states and twelve hundred miles traversed […]

Time passes differently in the solitude of hotel rooms. The mind expands, but lazily, and the body contracts in its bright box of space. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.

At first, it seemed like the saddest thing to me, that no one would ever see these paintings. But then I got to thinking: What if you tried to take this wall and put it in a gallery somewhere? It would simply be five faded paintings in a gallery. And that’s when I realized: perhaps […]

Thank you for giving us the oppressor to consider your workbook. We regret that we are unable to carry it in the maggot. Warmest regards, The Educations.

At a nightclub in Istanbul once, Gillian had been shocked, without quite knowing why, to find one of those vacant, sweetly pink and blue church Virgins, life-sie, standing as part of the decorations, part hat-stand, part dumb-waitress, as you might find a many-handed Hindu deity or plaster Venus in an equivalent occidental club. Now suddenly, […]

Your parents don’t get to tell your story. Your sisters don’t. When he’s old enough, even Pat doesn’t get to tell your story. I’m your husband and I don’t even get to tll it. So I don’t care how lovesick this director is, he doesn’t tell it. Even fucking Richard Burton doesn’t get to tell your story! […]

She was Hamlet and his father and Shakespeare: she saw Milton’s snake and the miraculous flying horse of the Thief of Baghdad, but Saint Paul’s angels rested under suspicion of being made-up because she had been told they were special because true. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.

Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. These are first-person memories—I Memories. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief—like the Much Ado wrap party at the old Playhouse in 1961, when you seduced Ron. Even recalling it is like […]