Big Fish Eat Little Fish

It “is always ‘symbolic,’ even when it is ‘real’.” -Marshall Sahlins, “The Ethnography of Cannibalism” “We’ll eat you up– we love you so!” -Wild Things to Max, Where the Wild Things Are I’m almost done with Typee, Melville’s… hmm… dumbest novel. I think Typee is the novel I could write. I mean I could write […]

Lecompton

The town died as soon as its industry left. They abandoned a Catholic church, half built. All the Catholics left. People who stayed took their heritage seriously, preserving a Victorian-era wreath made of human hair of the dead, clocks brought from the old country, and the yokes their oxen wore. Today it has a population […]

Classic Christmas Breakdowns

If you haven’t had a Christmas breakdown yet, THERE IS STILL TIME. I had a minor one when I decided I would run into the mall and pick up a pine-scented candle. Having a pine-scented candle is part of my Christmas celebrating. It had already been a day of near-misses: friends I was supposed to […]

Steel

My darling friend, with whom I sat in the passenger seat of my own car, as he drunkenly drove it up the hill, from downtown Kansas City, to wherever we were going, it didn’t matter, the top was down, and I put in “Kind of Blue,” an entry-level, amateur jazz album, but the only level […]