After reading Partial Objects today, an amazing post, all about things like Lacan and the Soul—

All I know is, my soul is a pest. Or whatever that internal thing is that has kept yammering away, lo these many decades. Always with a very clear idea of what is right. Read the rest of this entry »

“Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives?” asks Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker

Oh, but it doesn’t—or rather, not only then. Not at all. Anything fantastic enough, witnessed, will do the trick.
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From The Last Time Anyone Was Happy:

I tore out the door the moment I heard the truck. R.T. slowly got out, leaned back against the hood and lit a cigarette like he had all the time in the world. Looking at me through the smoke, in that infuriating way he had.

“You got anything on under that T-shirt?” he said. Read the rest of this entry »

Pretending to take Jack Kennedy’s order. At JFK’s inauguration. January 20, 1961. Fifty years ago. When I was either an infant, or in high school, take your pick. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, right. Blog. Entries. Write. Timely. All this stuff to remember. I get so caught up in my own reading or in reading online of the various crises that sweep the web—and then there is real life, a blurry distinction if ever there was one. I feel like such a traitor to the San Francisco Chronicle, which was for so many years such a great read in the morning, a daily magazine almost; now this thin, flabby thing is thrown upon my doorstep that is so much easier to skim online. Read the rest of this entry »

Come down here and be my house monk. Course you can’t do that. Kids and all. And I am so much older than I used to be. I no longer look or feel very foxy, although god knows of course that I am a good-looking woman. Some things never change. I was watching Otis Redding at Monterey Pop, a time seemed to last forever, then. I don’t think I could bear to watch it if I didn’t, in some far corner of my dreams, think it could all happen again. Or never ended. Right, and Otis is not dead. He was twenty-five at the time of those incredible recordings. Twenty-five and bursting with a talent it’s hard to account for, with soul and good looks. Good moves. What if someone like that had lived?
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You have to think about what you are writing for. To whom (though, granted, the internet might as well be sending letters to the moon, except for a few good friends and loyal readers) and … and … I was going to say, Why, but that’s the question hanging over everything, lately. And I’ve always tried to be entertaining.
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I swear, nowhere is the power of the body to heal more evident than on Discovery Health, late at night. As the hours go on, the shows get more gross, until you have those awful shows like Impact, where surgeons fish around in cherry-colored fake blood … Read the rest of this entry »