“Excuse me, do you have an extra cigarette?” I asked a woman outside New York Penn Station on my way home from Reunions in June. As I inhaled, the previous nine months began to transform from life to memory, things that were happening to things that had happened, becoming things that had happened to me rather than things I had made happen.
Or rather, I’ve done it—successfully completed my first debate with Sen. John McCain, whom I refer to as ‘John’ in order to seem familiar and approachable and non-Muslim.
The first months of freshman year went by so quickly. I hooked up with the guy who became my boyfriend within days of arriving on campus, and my friends and I managed to garner the attention of what seemed like … Read More
My father did consulting for years. Whenever he—or my uncle, also a consultant—began talking about work, I thought about their offices. They were small, poorly-lit rooms with terrible furniture, located in commercial parks off county roads. They were depressing. My … Read More
Schmitz’s real purpose is to marginalize 185 Nassau and a group of people who create. And how better to do this than to reduce all their striving to a simple exercise in what Edward Said terms “refinement”—the long, steady, reactionary march toward sameness, marked by a constant re-reading and emulating of a constricted Western canon. Anyone can write a villanelle in a vacuum, but the teaching of creativity, the encouragement of a fresh perspective—these demand an understanding of the physical world and of the writer’s particular circumstances.
“Everytime I looked down at my cigarette, it was just as long as it had been the last time I checked. She then moved on to telling me about her internship.”
This poem not about flowers just goes to show how far we’ve come since the days when people could practically not think without a daffodil, when in poetry a rose was not yet just a rose but always stood for … Read More
George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, KG, GCSI, GCIE, PC was a man few of us can afford to forget. Besides keeping the bloody Russians out of India, he wore a metal corset to combat a spinal injury … Read More
I know, I know, I haven’t written in a long while, but I wish for Chrissakes you’d stop yammering on about it. I have obligations, obli-fucking-gations, and there’s no getting around them. If you think for one second that I’m … Read More
