Knowing where all the movie theaters are in the Bay Area taught me a considerable amount of geography. The Embarcadero Center, spanning five blocks and connected with hypnotic tile, is not just named conveniently for its adjacent landmark. It’s also the home of an excellent art house theater. You can almost see it in The Conversation. There’s Harrison Ford, lying to reporters in the breezeway. Leave San Francisco, and things get less glamorous. You sit in boxy multiplexes, designed with […]
In Some Sense, But in Another, Not at All: Talking about Music with Paul Muldoon
You’ll see the word “gaiety” a thousand times if you read any essay on Paul Muldoon; while linguistic feats like “pulley glitches, gully pitches” abound in his work, he is somehow never donnish. He can show you ways of looking at words without pushing you away from them. His resume—spotted as it is with names like Princeton, Oxford, and The New Yorker, where he is the poetry editor—also includes two rock bands, operas, and a song that has been covered in […]
The Reading Life: “Shooting an Elephant” and Orwell’s Clarity
I once wanted to be a lawyer, and being a paralegal was a stop on the way to where I thought I wanted to go. To get to 100 Church Street I took the M15 bus down a road where pedestrians were not allowed, past 1 Police Plaza and the courthouse named for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, stopping in front of J&R Electronics. I would walk through the park to Broadway. I would get a large coffee at Dunkin Donuts. The whole thing felt less […]
The Reading Life: Henry James in a Panic
I will not be the first or the last person to think of her experiences as an American in Paris while reading a Henry James novel. But I can’t help it. The Ambassadors does one trick, among many others, very well: it takes me back to all the comparisons I made, but barely understood, between my life at home and my life abroad. “We’re all looking at each other–and in the light of Paris one sees what things resemble,” […]
Michael Robbins vs. Yahoo! News: A Drone Story
Let’s say you’re a poet. You’re the kind of poet whose heart the New York Times calls shallow but full. “Alert as a tidal buoy facing down a tsunami,” Dwight Garner says. All right. So you’re one of those poets.
The Reading Life #1: All Roads Lead to Flannery O’Connor
I told many people the story of the suitcase lady. After I met her, I wrote the story out in an email, and I copied and pasted that into other emails, to others who find themselves saddled with my daily correspondence. Weeks later I was still talking about it. On a train leaving San Francisco on Christmas Eve, my hand held up to shield the mid-day sun, I heard myself ask my dad, as a rhetorical ending to the […]
A Year of Favorites: Jen Vafidis’s Favorite New Books of 2012
Whenever I come up with these lists of my obsessions, I feel so uninspired. The way I got from point A to point B seems so dull in retrospect: I picked up Steve Erickson because I was going to Los Angeles for a trip; I got to Anthony Madrid through his friend Michael Robbins; looking back on my trips through Seidel and St. Aubyn it’s obvious I have a curious fascination with sadists and ornery jerks who qualify for AARP […]
Live Springs and Popsicles: A Between Books Conversation with Amelia Gray
The first story by Amelia Gray that I read was “Babies.” The first sentence of that story, if you recall, is this: “One morning, I woke to discover I had given birth overnight.” My first impression was healthy skepticism. How long, I thought, could this go on? I scrolled down the page to confirm that the story was shorter than most. It was. I kept reading, knowing I didn’t have much to suffer if it was bad. The second sentence […]