Magnificent Octopus

Well, here was my first lesson: it had almost nothing to do with computers, the modernity I was trying to understand. Computers were the bon...

Writing, I'm convinced, is often nothing but revenge — a way of twirling one's mustache, donning buckler and sword and feathery hat...

Some days are better than others. I am walking more. It seems to me that, in my neighbourhood, vehicular traffic has increased, while foot...

You can't help but take walks in the Appenzell. If you look at the small white-framed windows and the busy, fiery flowers on the sills, ...

It's Mother's Day, quiet outside except for the wind. Delicious breakfast in bed — I'm so lucky. My mother will have to leave he...

I walk to the lodging. The key to the front door has slid inside the deadbolt. But I have no recollection of this action ever taking place...

On Agnes Martin : Making art seems to have been a kind of meditations for her: she meant her paintings as aids to contemplation — "flo...

Still in the process of becoming, the soul makes room. Here's another meditative, highly interior novel that I find difficult to write a...

Day 50. I'm getting sick of this, really today I just want to cry, I'm tired of planning breakfasts and of planning dinners and of r...

When promotional material for Cult Writers: 50 Nonconformist Novelists You Need to Know fell into my inbox, I couldn't resist comparing...

Most mornings I wake with my body full of tension, as if I've been clenching my jaw and my fists all night. One night this week I drea...

Now that I have so much time to myself, I wonder at my times of happiness, why I've been allowed them, even now when I am lonely. Why I ...

I choose what I want to see. I know I am imagining this. I, in the here and now, am willfully abstracting my own history. Because? There are...

Day 35. No baguette. My mistake: Too early to the grocery, before they'd received their bread delivery. I am starting to find my groov...

And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time. There...

On the thirty-first day, I run out of the good scotch. I listen to Beethoven's Ninth repeatedly, with its Ode to Joy. Last night I dre...

Twenty-eight days later. Every morning between 7 and 7:30, I hear a flock of geese fly overhead. Once or twice a day, we hear an airplane....

Neath the sea the land sinketh, the sun dimmeth, From the heavens fall the fair, bright stars; Gusheth forth steam and gutting fire To ve...

I have never asked a bookseller for a book recommendation. Disclosing desires and expectations to a stranger whose only connection to me is,...

Allegedly you are not supposed to cut to the chase and ask your fellow dater to tell you about the time he was most soul-crushingly lonely. ...