Joe Brainard’s I Remember
Last month, I read Georges Perec’s I Remember, an unsorted list of personal recollections, each prefaced with the title phrase….
Daybook
Finding Unpublished Verses
If you lose your parents in middle age, then by the time you sort their school papers, you’ve resolved most…
Memory. Oblivion.
I’ve taken a break from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s massive novel-memoir My Struggle to read a very different kind of autobiography: Georges…
What Matters at Point Reyes
The other day, I picked up Robert Bly’s Point Reyes Poems, a chapbook first published in the mid-70s. Bly is…
Reconstructing a Grandmother
From out of the blue, I get a message from Dan, a stranger living on the other side of the…
Eight Hundred Pages into Knausgaard
I’ve asked friends about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 3,500-page novelesque autobiography My Struggle. Most have never heard of it. Most of…
Ai Weiwei Sojourns in Venice
Last year, Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and dissident, popped up in posters and graffiti throughout New York. Now he’s…
The Suitcase at the Center of Nebraska
Some of the photographs in my family files are grotesque and frightening, others are mundane, and a few are unintentionally…
The Hand that Wants to Become God
This past week, an anonymous neighbor left two shopping bags full of books at the Little Library we built at…
Boxes both Little and Big
It wasn’t an earthquake that left the wreckage on the left. It was a demolition crew. This former home, in…
Left Write & Centaur 