Activity

Listening to Edgar being patronized, Finlay’s eyes glittered violently. Laetitia actually became quite animated, telling us about a Vietnamese restaurant she’d found in Mitte which served a superlative larb. At a moment when everyone else was safely occupied in other conversations, I asked Finlay h…

[...] I’d developed a reliable strategy for warding off conversation. Whenever he started demanding that I justify my work because it didn’t meet some Edgarian criterion of relevance or value, I’d claim that “from a methodological perspective” I didn’t accept that there was a world outside the text…

Empty coffee cups, beer cans, underwear on the floor—I was creating a teenage midden, fouling my adult nest.

[...] ne of the more unpleasant surprises of my fellowship was the weekly delivery of a piece of paper, pushed under my door like a hotel bill, with a statistical breakdown of my “activity.” Hours spent, documents created, sites visited, and so on. Naturally, the first time this happened, I was out…

There is a speaker in Goethe’s poem, someone who tells the reader about the mountains and the treetops and the birds. What interested me was the person the poem was talking to, the “you” who would soon be at peace. If I were a poet who went for a walk and was reminded of my mortality, the obvious t…