At certain points in every girl’s life gender politics force choices between the male world and the female world. Between girlfriends and guy friends. Between the sometimes fickle loyalty of female friends and the weirdly nonchalant allegiance of male friends. I long ago opted for the male world. Frankly, men are more fun. They have …
Category Archives: Special Report
Arrival
It’s always night when I arrive. The little Embraer 145 lands and shudders to a heavily braked stop at the end of the runway. Then turns and taxis back toward the terminal. Where an air-stair is wheeled up to the side of the plane and we, the passengers, descend. The air is warm and damp, …
I Believe (after Ron Shelton)
I believe in the image, the line, the stanza, the iambic foot, the perfect word. Assonance, slant rhymes, that the formal forms still have a place in modern poetry. I believe that Shakespeare wrote the plays. I believe in a constitutional amendment outlawing poetry about poetry and the use of the word “suffuse.” I believe …
Things I’ve Learned Since Grade School — Dialog Commas
I’ve always had an unreasonably intimate, if somewhat stormy, relationship with punctuation. On one hand I want punctuation to make sense — to be useful, predictable, and consistently applicable. On the other hand I want to be able to make use of it for my own ends — to fudge, push, pull, invert, and subvert …
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All In
Recently, after many years of being away from the art of putting pieces of fabric together with lengths of thread, I bought a new sewing machine. A sewing machine that requires not one but two getting acquainted classes for the new user, and whose owner’s manual is considerably larger than the one for the Dodge …