End of Semester Favorites
I asked my creative writing students (who, damn, I’m going to miss next semester) to chose paragraphs or stanzas from pieces we read that they thought would particularly stay with them. Here are some of them:
Heather Christle, “The Whole Thing Is The Hard Part”:
you have to live where the house lands on you
what else can you do your bones are all broken
and somebody loves you who is it tell me who
loves you not as much as I do I mean I even
built you a house and found you why won’t
you live in it
Bradford Morrow, “Rivages Roses for Niels Bohr”:
Late summer, warm. A walk after dinner. I looked for Bohr at the banquet but didn’t see him among the others. Word is he’s putting final touches on his address for tomorrow. The air here along the shores is heavy as pewter and as dark. Lights of the lakeside villas and hotels twinkle and shimmer, reflected on the water. I see a couple in a small boat out on the lake. The wake that tails their craft ridges the watery face of Como like iron filings drawn behind a magnetic charge. I wonder, Are they in love, their molecular hearts thrumming hard? Someone surely should be in love in such an evocative setting as this. Yes, I must believe that they are, and that the reason they are still out there, on the flat back of this mountain lake north of Milan, is because they don’t much want to row back to shore, where they will be forced to reenter the world, the other world.
We are between wars, as I say, because we are always between wars. Between great wars and many of us know it, although this occasion, which the awful Mussolini means for us to celebrate, has nothing to do with war per se.
Richard Brautigan, “The Weather In San Francisco” (the whole thing)
Read on →
