I Am Now Civilized for Alli Warren It is no longer possible for anything to happen. Wall jump. On the scoreboard each bulb is lit in succession until they are indistinguishable from crying, a stain spreading from my pocket. Each boss has a weakness. Turn the corner and poppies bloom, newsprint scattered everywhere. Then it’s time for sharing with those…
Author: Timothy Yu
The Pursuit of the Scientific Life for Alli Warren Without a medium through which to propagate. Cream sodas. She married into a grateful man, carrying cardboard boxes down to the train station. We are willing to stipulate bones. Fingers for probing clogged drains. What to say about fire and water, each theory bent back on itself like skin. Reverse lookup.…
This week’s New Yorker has a Talk of the Town piece on bloggers with book contracts, a periodic source of fascination/jealousy/hysteria online and off. I guess it’s because that’s the primary way the print media’s been able to understand the blogging phenomenon–as raw material, apprenticeship for novel- or memoir-writing (for autobiographical or gossip blogs) or for columned punditry (for political…
I’d like to think that the major TV networks’ declining to carry President Bush’s “major” speech on Iraq on Monday was some kind of turning point, a gradual and groggy waking-up from a previously abject fealty to the Bush agenda. An outraged Trib column this morning reminded me how shocking this really ought to be: that a prime-time address by…
Robin’s students were agog at the American Idol T-shirt she was wearing under her blazer in class today. None of them would admit to watching it, of course (I’m guessing U of C undergrads are above television), but they did ask her whether she had gotten the shirt by auditioning. She was polite enough not to point out that we’re…
Okay, looks like I’ll be back in the Bay Area in about two weeks–June 10-14–in order to don a big goofy red-and-black gown with huge down-to-my-knees sleeves and a hexagonal hat with a gold tassel on top so I can sit in a football stadium for two hours to listen to Sandra Day O’Connor and then maybe they will hand…
We Spit Into Each Other for Alli Warren Your service is unimpressive. Bone fragments, a layer of ash. He is cradling his son in his arms as I rearrange the houseplants in the shape of intestines. You’ll feel a stick, then hopefully nothing. Imagine that it is Wednesday, unless you are imagining that it is Thursday, in which case please…
Here’s your Sunday Right-Wing Chicago Trib Watch: –A gleeful front-page prediction that Kerry’s strategy of playing up his Vietnam service will backfire; an opinion piece obviously commissioned to support this idea goes so far as to call Kerry’s service “unimpressive”. (I also note that the Trib has swallowed the right’s line about the emergence of a voting bloc of “NASCAR…
My Supple Spot for Alli Warren Kind of like incisors, clenched through meat. Strappy sandals. Our friends become successful and then we’re running deep under them, rattling their hardwood floors. Gabby, as in idiot, or decline to state. Dear Daddy, I am moving upward through my pink-toothed dress and then it is like being chewed by something when I am…
Ron Silliman on the Free Radicals anthology, observing, among other things, that “a 150-page collection by Del Ray Cross would be a Major Event indeed.” Hear hear! I haven’t seen the anthology, but I admit to having been a little weirded out by the subtitle, “American Poets Before Their First Books.” The title suggests a catch-them-while-you-can, next-big-thing tone to the…