Feb 9, 2018
“For of course that’s what happened; you’ve known that all along; even if you don’t read the papers, you know what the world’s like, and the minute you heard my voice you knew I was going to tell a story you’ve heard a thousand times before. You duck your head...
Jan 27, 2018
More bad love this week. This time with me behaving badly. Because there has to be something wrong with the ones who want you, right? I think I may have mentioned once or twice that, in my day job, I’m a medievalist. And one of my areas of specialization—if you know...
Jan 19, 2018
Now we’re going to talk about love. Not because Valentine’s Day is practically upon us, squeezing our throats and hearts (come on, you know Hallmark cards make you tear up), forcing us to stare our sad little love lives square in the face. More like in spite of that....
Jan 13, 2018
We stayed in a quiet area this time, away from the rowdy bars—rows of Georgian houses, noble proportions and glowing fan windows. We walked along those quiet streets to get to restaurants, and wondered what the lit-up buildings were. Once every five years, a city gets...
Dec 15, 2017
I discovered a cemetery this week, or the remains of one. In the complex where I live, its name reflective of common health and good: a relic of 70’s utopia, American hippie style. Set in the middle of Nature, the compact, energy-efficient dwellings are individually...
Dec 8, 2017
House of Mirrors: Al Franken resigns. Roy Moore gets $$ from the RNC. House of Horrors, I: You’re sitting on a plane and the guy in the seat next to you–he has what looks like a dead, stuffed chipmunk on his head, or is that his hair?–tries to put...
Nov 30, 2017
Hands up skirts, on thighs, brushing bottoms. Off-color comments, propositions, power. Roy Moore? Sure. But Charlie Rose?! Et tu, Brute? The tsunami unleashed by Harvey Weinstein’s fall from grace, the finally-making-public of distasteful truths everyone acknowledged...
Nov 24, 2017
Two weeks before Thanksgiving, in Uppsala, Sweden, a beautiful lop-eared rabbit named Stella died. I didn’t know Stella, or her humans. I follow them on Instagram. Stella’s death was unexpected, as rabbits’ passings through the veil so often are. It brought back the...
Nov 16, 2017
This week: Granada, one of my favorite places to eat and drink. Berenjena frita—fried eggplant, thin slices both tender and crispy, drizzled in molasses. Cogollos a la cordobesa—hearts of romaine tossed with crunchy little bits of fried garlic and the olive oil they...
Nov 11, 2017
This post was meant to be about Roy Moore and Kevin Spacey and young girls and young boys (and lest we focus on our own sorry age as the nadir point of such abuses, I’ll just remark that a sub-genre of medieval Arabic poetry waxed lyrical comparing the merits of the...
