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Everything here is about money; when it looks like it’s not about money, then it’s definitely about money. This is the second paradox. That the money too is both fictional and real, both exhilarating and tragic, both there and not there. The town itself embodies this, glittering and triumphant, b…

Such as it is, this is my poetics. It’s nothing too fancy—a person in a satirical mood might say it’s just a little Russian Formalist defamiliarization with a bit of mainline Protestant uplift thrown in. It’s also my politics and my ethics, such as those are. I try not to understand my students too…

Ashley looks at this shambles of a person every day and sees someone else. She sees that person so intensely that I am renewed. I can never deserve this; all I can do is try to return the favor. When she has dashed herself against some bureaucracy for days and weeks to secure some small mercy for s…

But you have to have had the vision in the first place. In the time between meeting and dating Ashley, I had dated, among a few others, another woman who developed brain cancer early in our relationship, when we would normally be figuring out what we were to each other. After her diagnosis, I decid…

That is the story! Who could live up to it? Not me, certainly. In the years between meeting and dating her, I had lost my heart a few more times, and I had learned the miraculous healing powers of irony, of laughing at your old selves so you could take the current one very seriously. Every several …