The ceiling of the Library of Congress is embossed with aluminum. Aluminum, the tour guide tells us, was a precious metal. Once. On the top there is a torch. Torches are prominently featured. As are: Minerva, owls, and women showing or unshowing one or both of their breasts, it varies a great deal. Minerva has […]
Read More The LibraryWhen I was zipping through a practice exam to use with my students, I slowed way down to read Ralph Ellison. I don’t really know anything about him. I’ve never read Invisible Man. Strange as it seemed, I was enjoying reading a passage on a test. I immediately went back and ordered it from Amazon, […]
Read More Distance“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 […]
Read More Fetishes: Annotated Bibliography“‘Don’t go, Peter,’ [Wendy] entreated, ‘I know lots of stories.’ Those were her precise words, so there can be no denying that it was she who first tempted him.” — Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie They have everything in Neverland: hideouts, pirates, mermaids, caves, treehouses, wild animals, natives. Everything except stories. Neverland is only in the […]
Read More Things Other People Said: Long Ago or Far Away
Going On 