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Morning Prayer
Morning Prayer Little red psalm books that we gathered from a rack like basketballs: sometimes I would get three or four, for my friends, a utopian gesture of plenty that was received passively, the cheap worn covers sliding across the plastic tables. I hated the mornings when we read a long psalm, legs stiffening with…
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It Looks Like Paris, If You Squint
“She told me she was a writer, and when I left she gave me three books in French, on Proust, Vienna, and magic. It was a sweet thing to do, because our conversations had been mostly in English, and we tried French together like friends failing to be lovers.”
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Corecore and the Logic of Montage
“This genre’s title, corecore, makes a totalizing claim on the thousands of balkanized subgenres and subaesthetics that fleet past the user: only a certain set of objects and clips can be dazecore or college dormcore, but corecore encompasses all such ‘cores,’ all these oddly particular aesthetics.”
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The Sunset Art: Thoughts on Photography and Travel
“For Sontag, photography gives the amateur tourist photographer a sense of control— but superficial control. Knowledge— but superficial knowledge. In an unfamiliar, foreign environment the camera offers the illusive feeling of possession and command, in a very real sense empowering the photographer to take something of the place with them as their own.”
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A Trip to the Orangerie
“In many ways my trip thus far had been haunted by Benjamin; every glimpse of the underground Metro lights, the carefully planned streets, the dimly lit bookstores brought some passage, some fragment of prose from his works to mind.”
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Telescoping Echo
To telescope, we begin with 300 words, then slice the word count in half for each successive section. We stop when the numbers stop dividing evenly. This week, eight Nass writers telescope the word “echo” (echo, echo). Lucia Brown At some point, the wrought iron fence that trapped the house disappeared, leaving behind a crumbling…
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The Rains of Macondo: Relevance, Our Country Friends, and the Literature of the Pandemic
“The rain described by García Márquez seemed compellingly similar to the virus that had upended my own life and the lives of so many others: impersonal, unrelenting, and showing no sign of ending any time soon.”