The Glue That Holds Us Together
Elmer’s glue had to be smeared all over one’s finger, the inside of the wrist, or possibly the whole hand, then allowed to dry—blowing on it was permitted—and slowly, deliciously, peeled off.
Elmer’s glue had to be smeared all over one’s finger, the inside of the wrist, or possibly the whole hand, then allowed to dry—blowing on it was permitted—and slowly, deliciously, peeled off.
Was my cheerful trespass neighborly, an act of communal solidarity, or a brazen crime? Our jurisprudence gauges severity by dollar value, but what is the worth of a half-dead rose in an alley?
In Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, Ramie Targoff points out that when Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own, “she knew almost nothing about the powerful literary works a small group of women had written—and in many cases, published—around the time of Shakespeare.”
Michael Eastman wants to walk around my little Southern Illinois town with his camera. A photographer whose work is in museums, who has shot the world’s extremes of beauty and decay, wants to walk around Waterloo, Illinois, and shoot? What the hell do I show him?
We corkscrew downward, using the nation’s declining literacy as a reason to degrade the quality of reading material, which then further constrains our vocabularies and decreases our literacy….
Whatever winds up documenting modern lives holds nothing like Henry VIII’s love letter to Anne Boleyn, signed, “written with the hand of him who wishes he were yours.” Our martyred heroes will not send letters from Birmingham or any other jail. Contemporary epistolary novels will be a rally of terse texts.
To the Cynics, the goal of life was, in literal translation, freedom from smoke—meaning false beliefs, pretense, and shallow lures.
Our corpses enrich your gardens, aerate your lawns, and plump your birds. Yet you see cicadas as a plague and a punishment?
Our tastes are being changed for us, homogenized by algorithms that force clicks of approval into spirals of popularity.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning exclaimed only, “Beautiful!” Martin Luther relaxed into amiability and said only “Yes.” Truman Capote—and this revelation breaks my heart—kept repeating “Mama.”