Jenny Allen - December, 2008

Did someone say something last night about playing bridge today if it rained? I seem to remember the husband in that nice couple who came for dinner suggesting it — it moved me how you could tell that even though he was talking about playing bridge as if he thought it was a campy idea, something our parents might do, he really wanted to do it. And did I say something like “Oh, I don’t know how to play bridge, but I’d love to learn!”? If I did, that’s because I felt sorry for him. Also, I think I was kind of drunk at the time.

I would not love to learn. I would hate to learn. Bridge is unlearnable by me. You have to have a partner and strategy and write things down on little pads of paper and somehow store the previous moves of others in your memory, like a squirrel storing nuts, for use later. It sounds like a job. A job I would get fired from on the first day, before lunch.

The New Yorker

Susan Sontag - September, 2001

The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.

The New Yorker

Wallace Stevens - 1922 - Let Be Be Finale of Seem

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Robert - April, 1992

Another wacky night doing things I had no intention doing. Mark took me to a party at a woman named Bettina's loft. Big, bright-colored art. Good booze. No people. Except Gianluigi the gadabout and (not surprising for some reason) Victor. He stands too close and gets too earnest. I was looking cute (almost as cute as the Dalmatian puppy with a fondness for crumpled black cocktail napkins). As I said goodbye, Bettina introduced me as "actor" to a boy that looked younger than me, and yet "producer." He started talking about paying his dues, so I had to go...

Zack took Mark and me to Lucky Strike and got progressively odder (about spiritual matters, sex, love, and life) and freer with his hands as the evening wore on. By the end, he was insisting repeatedly that Mark and I acknowledge his love for us. He also kissed me all over my face and gave me his (only okay) tie when I complimented it as a diversionary tactic. I will compliment a Bruce Weber photograph if I'm ever in his apartment again.

Robert - Today - Needless Hugging

There’s the shake and lean; the hug from behind; and, the newest addition, the triple — any combination of three girls and boys hugging at once.

“We’re not afraid, we just get in and hug,” said Danny Schneider, a junior at the school, where hallway hugging began shortly after 7 a.m. on a recent morning as students arrived. “The guy friends, we don’t care. You just get right in there and jump in.”

“If somebody were to not hug someone, to never hug anybody, people might be just a little wary of them and think they are weird or peculiar,” said Gabrielle Brown, a freshman at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in Manhattan.

Comforting as the hug may be, principals across the country have clamped down. “Touching and physical contact is very dangerous territory,” said Noreen Hajinlian, the principal of George G. White School, a junior high school in Hillsdale, N.J., who banned hugging two years ago. “It was needless hugging — they are in the hallways before they go to class. It wasn’t a greeting. It was happening all day.”
For this and much, much more, see the paper of record.

Edward Gorey - November 1992

N is for Neville who died of ennui

We all have periods when we're shining very brightly and people are calling us up and wanting to do things and so forth, and then somehow the phases of the moon change and we're hardly visible at all and the phone doesn't ring for days. I just go along with that. I wait for the phone to ring, usually.

-- The New Yorker

Robert - Today

This is one of my dreams: To live in a renovated gas station