December 18, 2015 The Brownings excelled at Christmas excess, and no one enjoyed it more than I did. Becoming an adult took most of the shine off the holiday for me. There is not much wonder in shopping and cooking and managing contentious relatives. But there was a time when Christmas wonder returned….
December 17, 2015 I have no idea if Tammy heard any of the things I said to her. Perhaps she can tell me someday when I see her on the other side. But this I know for sure: that waiting room was filled with people, and every single one of them belonged there. Everyone was in because Tammy had drawn them in. That is Tammy’s legacy. The legacy of belonging, the legacy of community.
December 16, 2015 Mr. Gooch didn’t have much to say about his inclinations toward matrimony, except to point out the obvious fact that he couldn’t marry both girls. When the solution to the impasse finally appeared, no one could say exactly where it had come from or who had suggested it. It was as though it had been there all along but had only revealed itself when the neighbors’ thinking had matured enough to recognize it.
December 15, 2015 They were in this neighborhood before we were, and they’ll be here when we leave. Theirs is a sad and angry life. The woman’s voice itself is a caricature: coarse, booze and smoke-ravaged. She tends to shout and taunt and curse sarcastically—all her fury and misery spat out in expletives.
December 1, 2015 “After class, I sat outside on the lawn, revisited Baudelaire. Were there chemicals in my book that made me swoon––something in the paper of Les Fleurs du Mal that affected my senses? I licked a page to see if it had LSD on it. How did poetry achieve the effect of making me feel drunk?” Marilyn Kallet will discuss a new translation of Chantal Bizzini’s poems at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on December 3, 2015, at 3 p.m.
November 20, 2015 We moved to Paris just shy of five years ago because, above all, we wanted our sons to become global citizens, to learn another language, to go to school with children from countries the world over, to see more of the world than a more conventional life in the United States would allow. But the very centrality and symbolism of Paris is what’s now making us all feel more vulnerable than we ever have.
