Dickensian

“Marley was dead, to begin with.” The day I visited Dickens’ house, it snowed. I couldn’t have asked for more. It was a sparse snow, I was wearing wool and freezing my ass off, and I had pleasant company, cheerfully tolerating my quest. Finally, I got to open the banker-green door, which Mr. Dickens himself […]

Fetishes: Annotated Bibliography

“The French have a horror of the smell of cooking food, whereas Americans find it appetizing; in the nineteenth century the first French Rothschild went so far in this aversion as to have the food brought from the kitchen to the dining room on an odourless, because underground, train.” –Edmund White, The Flaneur (I couldn’t […]

Household Words 3

The fact is, I only met Ellen’s parents a handful of times before I went off to San Diego. When people die, it’s natural to magnify their significance retroactively. I tried. I didn’t have a lot to go on. I observed nothing compelling about Ben and Amanda Walden. Maybe her mother’s eyes were too […]

Household Words: 2

In Middleton, I was in the school of social work. I had decided against medical school. My mother and brother were in a car accident years before, and they were just bodies, problems and numbers, in that E.R. I wanted people to be something more than bodies. I worked in a fabric store during those […]