I’d seen the shows and the movies. I’d been there three times before. I’d even written a play that took place there. But nothing really prepared me for my trip to Cancun this Spring Break.
There is a tiny man in her hair and he is screaming at me. “Hello there!” He is screaming. “Please remove me from this strand of hair!” He is screaming. “This is a terribly inconvenient place for me to be right now!” He is screaming.
“Killing the Angel in the House,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “is part of the occupation of a woman writer.” This particular epithet had come to encapsulate the Victorian stereotype of sexual frigidity, otherworldly purity, and picture-perfect domesticity which was the ego-ideal for a century of unhappy women. Joyce Carol Oates has taken Woolf’s literary dictum to the next level: her Angels are not themselves killed; they themselves kill.
How did this poor excuse of a pulp fiction spy novel, bereft of the quirky detail, realistic complexity, genuine human interaction, and factual statement that make a true memoir interesting rise to ninth on the NYT bestseller list? The answer lies in his narrative form of analysis of US foreign affairs, and in the nature of his target audience.
The last few bars of a big-band tune exposing themselves without a hint of self-awareness and the half-sober apercus of a gaggle of twenty or so be-sequined, be-suited women and men of a certain age their laughter playing soft on … Read More
I. Ted Hughes has died and gone to Hell. Most of the time he died as a human, Almost every time with his eyes open. The first time he died, he was a woman crawling on hands and knees, through … Read More
Watch the balloons sway in the center of the slick dance floor. You are here and you are not here, swaying yourself on too-thin heels and much too much mixed drink. Tie your hair back. You’re hopped up on hoping the ending of your night will deliver what the beginning has promised since you fished your junior prom dress out of the dorm closet you’re sure has moths.
“Genealogy is an engaging project to undergo because it navigates the…paradoxical relationship between a narrowly defined conception of the self and the larger, more communal one”
While I am crowded into the park with my Hong Kong friends, awaiting the moment to begin our procession from Causeway Bay westward to Central, I wonder: Why is it that I, a black American who does not even understand Cantonese, who has lived in Hong Kong for less than one month, am out among the crowds supporting the protests?
