Peter Selgin's Blog, page 5

Geography is My Major

For over a year—since her husband passed away—Florence had lived alone in her Yonkers apartment overlooking the wide, silent Hudson River. She had her plants, her books, her piano. All in all, she felt she had done a good job keeping despair at bay. She was no brooder. Though there were other widows and widowers in her building, she tended to avoid them. They complained too much. One was losing her eyesight, another her hair, a third said the building was much, much too cold. Why don’t they t...

Postmodernism’s Smoking Circuits

Preparing the syllabi for my courses. The hardest is the one for a “special topics” course called “Unclassifiables,” for which I am entirely to blame. I thought it might be fun to do a survey of books that bend and blur genres, that don’t fit neatly into any one category, that combine travel writing with autobiography, say, or novel and notebook, or biography and autobiography. Some gorgeous and successful works have been written recently that fit this bill. I’m thinking of books like Geoff D...

Everything to Live For — I

Tell me: how would you feel if you saw yourself hanging by the neck from a crossbeam? How would you feel, confronted by those gasping dull eyes, that hanging slack jaw, that skin gone a pale shade of yellowish-gray, those palms turned outward as if to answer the question—why—with a shrug? The same love handles, the same knobby knees, the same flat, clumsy feet with the same long, crooked, widely-spaced toes, the same hairless arms, the same bony wrists. Even the facial hair—a month’s worth o...

Under Less-Than-Ideal Circumstances

Hungarian author and screenwriter János Székely (1901-1958) who wrote under the ironic (as you’ll see) name “John Pen,” would leave his New York City apartment mornings for aimless walks during the course of which he would be seen by passersby muttering incessantly to himself; in fact he was “writing” his novelTemptation,a work of 250,000 words composed in its entirely without once taking pen (or any other implement) to paper. Having walked the streets for miles and hours in an apparent da...