Marsha > Recent Status Updates

Ash's voice is mellifluous; when we asked what his favorite music was, he said, "I like the Four Seasons by Vivaldi." Hex and Ez looked at him, surprised. "What?" he said, defensive. "You just don't seem like the classical type," said Hex. "I would have guessed indie, art, emo."

Flipping open the lid at the top, he inserted one of the coins into the slit and gave a push. There was an immediate twanging noise. He turned the tin upside down again, and the false bottom fell onto the bed. Then he turned it the right way and peered in. And read the words: TO MY NEPHEW

Matryona had some new felt boots made. She bought a new jerkin. She had an overcoat made out of the worn-out railwayman's greatcoat given to her by the engine driver from Cherusti who had married Kira, her foster daughter. In the middle of winter Matryona sewed two hundred rubles into the lining of this coat for her funeral. "Now my mind's a bit easier, Ignatich."

We could no longer keep count in the family of all the armchairs she had presented to married couples, young and old, which on a first attempt to sit down upon them had at once collapsed beneath the weight of their recipients. But my grandmother would have thought it sordid to concern herself too closely with the solidity of any piece of furniture in which could still be discerened a flourish of the past.

Hot Africa and languid Asia play
(An absent world, defunct, and far away)
Within that scented forest, dark and dim.
As other souls on waves of music swim,
Mine on its perfume sails, as on the spray.

I watch Viola opening packets of food that I'm very grateful don't exist in Caliban. How can an entire meal be microwaveable? No wonder these humans age. Consuming things like that probably takes five years off your life instantly. Another day of my life is gone, without so much as a hint that Viola will wish anytime soon.

Pointing out inaccurate or unrealistic portrayals of women to younger grade school children--ages 5-8--does seem to be effective, when done judiciously: talking to little girls about body image and dieting can actually introduce them to disordered behavior rather than inoculating them against it.

I may be deemed superstitious and even egotistical in regarding this event as a special interposition of divine Providence in my favor. But I should be false to the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false and incur my own abhorrence.

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odors plain and hill:

She missed Father, though she did not have any more dreams about him. She missed Lucas and wondered if he missed her too. She missed her bed. She missed the monotony of life in De'Noran.

My retrospect of life recalls to my view many opportunities of good neglected, much time squandered upon trifles, and more list in idleness and vacancy. I leave many great designs unattepted, and many great attempts unfinished. My mind is burdened with no heavy crime, and therefore I compose myself to tranquillity.

To fifty chosen Sylphs, of special note,
We trust the important charge, the petticoat;
Oft have we known that sevenfold fence to fail,
Though stiff with hoops, and armed with ribs of whale.
Form a strong line about the silver bound,
And guard the wide circumference around.

To paraphrase Noel Coward, the only creatures foolish enough to venture out in the midday sun in the tropics are mad dogs and Englishmen. Not fitting into either of these categories, I nevertheless found myself in the Florida sun at noon, on Gasparilla Island, improbably riding shotgun in a golf cart while hiding a pellet rifle under my backpack.

The more Julia read and cross-checked and deduced and collated, the more she was convinced her goddess was real. It was like the goddess was just on the other side of all these useless words, trying to find Julia as Julia was searching for her. The goddess was warm, even humorous, and loving, but she had a second aspect, terrible in its bleakness: a mourning aspect that she assumed in winter.

She could have said no. She could have finished dialing the number of the car service and turned her back on the man with the porkpie hat and waited till the black town car came and whisked her away from it all. But she couldn't walk away because the dream of magic wasn't dead. She'd tried to kill it, to beat the life out of it but she couldn't. It was stronger than she was.

He’d give Josh this: maybe he blew their only chance to get back to the secret magical land, but he bought a very nice palazzo with the money. It was a glorious, grotesque heap of fifteenth-century marble, with its own tidy little dock out front. The interior teemed with curly plasterwork ornaments. It was a serious palace and it must have taken serious work to get it back on its feet.

Julia had logged another couple of telephone-pole paint blobs, one of which she'd stopped and studied quite closely using some kind of visual cantrip that he hadn't caught because she hadn't wanted him to catch it--she actually hid it with one hand as she cast it with the other.

She sat on her bed and stared at the file, which showed a time of creation that she remembered as having been during dinner, and she felt fear. Because the more she thought about it the more it seemed like she had two sets of memories for that afternoon, not just one. Of them them was almost too plausible. But the other one was insane.

The fact that you have to say, over and over again, how unimportant to you being gay is, is an eloquent sign of the times we live in. For it actually indicates just how important being gay truly is--if only to the extent that it dramatizes how much pressure you evidently feel to proclaim that being gay is unimportant. If it were really so unimportant, why would you have to keep saying so?

Fellows's model also fails to account for aesthetically unaligned gay men who really don't care about history, old houses, design or style, preserving the past, or living in the perfect interior and whose taste is embarrassingly subject to frequent, egregious lapses. "All the gay men I know are terrible slobs, including you," John Weir's mother told [him] over the phone.

Such generational struggles between father and son are very serious business. Indeed, they are the stuff of high tragedy. A generational conflict between women, by contrast, even at its most serious or passionate, cannot rise above the level of melodrama. That is not a statement of my personal feelings about the matter. I am not endorsing this cultural attitude; I'm simply reporting it.

The possibility that your mother might turn against you and reject you doubtless remains a perennial nightmare scenario in the minds of many queer kids, a source of panic never entirely laid to rest and often exacerbated by the volatility of the emotional relations between gay boys and their mothers.

In order to specify the exact nature of the cultural work performed by this insistent and persistent violation of generic boundaries--a transgressive practice characteristic of gay male culture, which seems determined to teach us to laugh at situations that are horrifying or tragic--I am going to examine in detail the gay male reception, appropriation and queering of one classic artifact of American popular culture.

Love isn't what you expect it to be. You imagine being drunk on happiness, but the truth is, you worry all the time. Is she ill? Hurt? Might she meet someone else? There's a moment when you realize that you've gotten everything you wished for. And right on its heels is the understanding that this means you have so much more to lose.

I glance around and realize Seraphima has wandered away. Through the milling crowd I catch a flash of silver-blond hair. "That way," I say, and we rush toward her. We round the corner and find Seraphima on top of the miniature plastic castle that's part of the children's play zone. She stands atop a turret, shoving away toddlers. "Begone, trolls," she yells. "This is my kingdom!" "Oh God," I groan.

One of the first snafus we discovered when Oliver moved here was realizing that Edgar had his driver's license and Oliver didn't even know what a car was. We couldn't very well stick Oliver behind a wheel without it ending catastrophically--but we also couldn't have Jessamyn ask him to drive to the grocery store and wonder why he refused.

Will Fellows makes a similar point at the beginning of his own book about male homosexuality as a cultural practice.

The Aioans move wildly, unpredictably, as swift and vivid as the fire. Several sit and beat drums or play on slender wood flutes, and the dancers add their own rhythm with their bodies. No two move alike. I stop eating and just gape, probably looking like an idiot. But I can't help it. It's captivating. "Come." I look up and see Eio standing over me, his hand extended. "I don't dance." "Come."

Another day and night passed or at least that's how it seemed. I lived by my body's rhythms, sleeping when I was tired, drinking when I was thirsty and experiencing the stirrings of hunger. Since I hadn't been eating, I was weak from lack of nutrients and I had to drag myself from my bedroom to the bathroom. Without a mirror I couldn't see myself, but I knew my hair was straggly and matted in places.

"Did you bring any books with you from Ashton Place?" "Of course," Penelope said, for no Swanburne girl would be caught without something interesting to read tucked into her pocket or purse. Miss Mortimer nodded approvingly and left. Alas, the only books Penelope had close at hand were the cannibal book, her own book of melancholy German poetry in translation and Mr. Gibbon's tome about the Roman Empire.