Given that I was seven years old in 1968, I didn’t want to hear about college students dropping acid and prancing around nude in public places, or Muhammad Ali shouting, “I ain’t got no beef with them Viet Cong!” or the Soviet menace, or Richard Nixon, or Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, or Herman Hesse, or the Chicago riots, or burning bras, or Neo-Realist cinema, or anything else painful, incendiary, ugly, or
Everything is an imposed illusion, an undisclosed projection, observed by unwitting players seeking knowledge just beyond perception. The beautiful things translate, perched on a rocky ledge at sunset, watching the valley turn to gold.
On her afternoon walk, Amanda Tournier noticed a big cardboard box sitting in the middle of her neighborhood park. She stopped and crossed her arms. “It’s probably empty,” she thought. She sat down on a nearby bench and let her imagination fill the box full of latent desires. A leather briefcase full of $100 bills. An envelope containing a remorseful letter from her ex-boyfriend Mason begging for forgiveness. An iPhone
In “Why I Continue To Write: Thirty-five years after Last Exit to Brooklyn,” Hubert Selby Jr. says of his youth, I went into the hospital in 1946, with advanced tuberculosis, and altogether I spent three and a half years in the hospital. By the time I got out I had had 10 ribs removed, one lung collapsed, a piece of the other one removed, and there were some severe complications
The ’67 Cadillac shot down a desolate prairie road and skidded into the parking lot of a diner, kicking up a wall of dust. Zeke threw the car in park, left it running, and ran inside. Whitney was placing a chicken fried steak in front of a lone customer from across the counter. Zeke grabbed her wrist below the scars that ran up her forearm and said, “They figured out
In the mid-1700s, natural phenomena were so poorly understood in the American Colonies that lightning was considered by many to be an indicator of God’s wrath. Accordingly, if lightning struck a house and caused a fire, neighbors often let the home burn to the ground because they figured this was God’s intention. Then in 1753 Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod because he rightly intuited that lightning was a buildup
