Alexandra Silber's Blog, page 25

Questions from Book Tour - Part 1

1. What’s your writing setup like? Do you have a certain playlist you listen to or a drink you always have?

Yes. I have a beautiful vintage pull-down writing desk! It has been handed down from my mother— she found it on the street when she was in college. When she discovered it, it was covered in layers of paint that she stripped away to reveal a beautiful raw wood. The desk has been in my home since childhood, and the handle where you “pull-down” is the face of a lion, that I always thought...

TV Series' I've Viewed in Entirety: A List

Vintage GOLD
Murder, She Wrote
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
Golden Girls
The Dick Van Dyke Show
Diagnosis: Murder
Columbo

Procedural Crime Drama
CSI: NY
CSI: Miami
Numb3rs
Medium
Bones
Dexter
White Collar
The Guardian
The Finder

Period Pieces
Miss Fisher Mysteries
Miss Marple
Poirot
Downton Abbey
Father Brown

Contemporary Classics
The West Wing
The Wonder Years
Breaking Bad
Carnivále
The Keepers

Still-Running
The Handmaid’s Tale
Family Guy
The Man in the High Castle
Mozart in the Jungle

from Measure for Measure

ANGELO.

Who will believe thee, Isabel?
My unsoil'd name, the austereness of my life,
My vouch against you, and my place i' the state,
Will so your accusation overweigh,
That you shall stifle in your own report
And smell of calumny. I have begun,
And now I give my sensual race the rein:
Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite;
Lay by all nicety and prolixious blushes,
That banish what they sue for; redeem thy brother
By yielding up thy body to my will;
Or else he must not only die the death,
But...

Sad Diary: (un)Happy Halloween

Dear Diary...

Adversity 101

    Last year I had a riveting conversation with one of my graduated students, that I (with their permission) decided to capture and share, here. In that instance, instead of the traditional “Ask Al” Q & A format, I chose to preserve the conversation in its dialectic essence, so you could see how beautifully the thoughts and lessons progressed. That conversation became the post "Cherish the Climb," and, to preserve the student's anonymity I called them "The Creature" (yes,...

from 'Different Seasons' by Stephen King,

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have peopl...

"I wish... I know"

     In 6th grade when asked by our middle school music teacher to bring in a CD of our favorite music, everyone else brought in Ace of Base, Boyz II Men and Mariah Carey, I? Brought in the 1989 Original Cast Recording of Into The Woods.
That’s right.
I brought in Stephen Sondheim.

I was obviously very popular, and by “popular” I mean I was not popular. But I didn’t care, because even at eleven, I could appreciate a 6/8 time signature, internal rhyming, all things Robert West...

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Coulda-been-ku 11

11. 
I should have loved you better. Not The One. But the best I knew. 
The hurt is nothing now—turned to gratitude andsentiment. All one.
You get three stanzas.For in the end, I’m proud of us. I’m proud of us.

Coulda-been-ku 10

10. 
You showed us how to love harder.  First rebellion.The first, everything.