I’ve been thinking about Dorothea Lange a lot lately, trying to figure out why her photographs resonate with me on a deep level. It’s not just the way she captured the struggles of migrant workers during the Great Depression –…
I was halfway through making a sandwich when I noticed Pandora’s phone sitting on the kitchen counter. Under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t have meant much. People forget their phones all the time. The problem was that Pandora wasn’t one of…
I’ll never forget the first time I stumbled upon John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing” – a television series he made in 1972, which was later transcribed into a book. I must have been 18 or 19 at the time, wandering…
In the sweltering heat of summer, when social calendars are at their most e exhausting, it’s easy to succumb to the promise of comfort and ease that at
I was standing in the kitchen trying to make breakfast and a halfway decent cup of coffee when I first started paying attention to John Mercer’s snoring. Normally I can tune it out. After living with someone for years, certain…
I’ve been reading Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” for weeks now, but I still can’t shake the feeling that he’s speaking directly to me. It’s not just his writing style – which is both lyrical and impenetrable at the…
I was standing in the kitchen making toast this morning when I first noticed something was wrong. Not with the toast itself—that part was going surprisingly well for once—but with everyone around me. Pandora had stayed over the night before…
Susan Howe’s writing has been stuck with me for a while now, like a thread I keep tugging on, trying to understand its texture and how it relates to my own thoughts. I’ve read her books multiple times, yet each…
Pandora left her hair tie on my desk this morning, and I didn’t think much of it at first. It’s one of those plain black elastic hair ties that seems to spend more time on her wrist than in her…
Max Ernst’s Surrealist landscapes have been etched in my mind since I first stumbled upon his work in an art history class during my senior year of college. At the time, I was struggling to find meaning in my own…
I was halfway through making breakfast when my phone buzzed. Karen had canceled our plans. The message itself was perfectly normal. Sorry, Hal. Family emergency. Rain check? That should have been the end of it. People cancel plans all the…
In the midst of this sweltering season, it’s not uncommon to see individual individuals sacrificing their well-being for the sake of optimization. The modern obsession with efficiency and
I’m standing in the kitchen staring at the coffee maker, and I’m almost certain it’s making a different noise than it did yesterday. Not a huge difference. Nothing dramatic. Just enough to make me pause in the middle of pouring…
I’ll never forget the first time I read Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”. It was a collection of short stories that left me feeling both mesmerized and unsettled, like standing at the edge of…
Carson McCullers. Her name has been floating around my mind for a while now, like a buoy on the surface of a stagnant pool. I’ve read her novels, devoured them almost, and yet she remains an enigma to me. Not…
I was halfway through making my second cup of coffee when I noticed that John Mercer hadn’t moved in at least twenty minutes. He was sitting on the couch staring at his phone with the kind of concentration usually reserved…
A walk down the street during these sweltering months is a study in contras contrasts. Some people move through the crowds with an air of consideration consideration, their
Sigmund Freud’s name pops up whenever I think about the human psyche, and it’s not just because of his famous mustache. I’ve always been fascinated by how he dared to ask the questions that everyone else wanted to avoid. Like,…
I was sitting in the living room trying to get some work done when I noticed something deeply unsettling. Pandora hadn’t moved in nearly half an hour. At first, I didn’t think much of it. People sit on couches all…
I’ve always been drawn to Wassily Kandinsky’s work, but it wasn’t until I stumbled upon his book “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” that I began to grasp why he resonates with me on a deeper level. As an art major,…
