Last week: 2752

It was at least a bracket on which to construct memory and, more so, a place of departure—perhaps the wrong way, like an elbow bent backwards. It became context: a way to delineate and map New York’s, and my, existence.

It’s my A.D. she said. Yeah, everything is before or after. After is when it all started to go bad.

Did you loose someone? No, luckily. Not that day, but soon enough. At the time, I thought I could have lost anyone, everyone. Or I was lost, and others were mourning the loss. For some, close enough to the epicenter, all those in the falls were our loss, and, too, something that had been collectively all of ours before was now lost with them. Physical proximity can in part explain this discarnate connection between strangers, those remained and those gone; the ripple effect that dissipates as it moves outward from point of origin.

For weeks the smoke, ill-defined, crawled slowly out of lower Manhattan; crossing the East River onto Brooklyn, hanging in the sky over apartment buildings, like mine. Enmeshed with the afternoon sun of that clear day, the amalgam of the smoke and ash of paper and plane and body went on to hue the sunset a beautiful, if unnatural, charcoal-red blood orange.




This was from the Writer’s Almanac last week.

D.H. Lawrence: 'Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.'

It was on this day in 2001 that two hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York City.

The Writer's Almanac, a daily antedote to existential crisis

I wrote recently about Hemingway. Below is a story about the author, summed up well by Garrison Keller's The Writer's Almanac, I'd been meaning to share. Added are a few other excerpts.


The Writer's Almanac for July 21, 2009

Hemingway said, 'The writer's job is to tell the truth.' In A Moveable Feast, he wrote: 'I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, `Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.'

There's a legend that Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to create a six-word story, and he said, 'For sale: baby shoes, never worn.' Inspired by this, an online magazine invited readers to submit their own six-word memoirs, a collection of which was published by Harper Collins in 2008 as Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure. Six-word memoirs include: 'All I ever wanted was more' and 'Moments of transcendence, intervals of yearning' and 'They called. I answered. Wrong number.'


Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head

"Advice to Young Poets" by Martín Espada, from The Republic of Poetry. (c) W.W. Norton & Company, 2008.


Here's part of another recent day's Almanac, from July 13, 2009

Hislop once said: 'Satire is the bringing to ridicule of vice, folly, and humbug. All the negatives imply a set of positives. Certainly in this country, you only go round saying, 'that's wrong, that's corrupt' if you have some feeling that it should be better than that. People say, 'You satirists attack everything.' Well, we don't, actually. That's the whole point.'


Money is such a treat.
It takes up so little space.
It takes no more ink
for the bank to print $9,998
than to print $1,001.
It flows, electronically;
it does not gather dust.
Like water, it (dis)solves everything.
Oceanic, it is yet as lucid
as a mountain pool; the depositor
can see clear to the sandy bottom.
It is ubiquitous and under pressure, yet
pennies don't drip from faucets.
Money is so tidy, so neat.
It is freedom in action: when you
give a twenty-buck bill to the cabbie,
you don't tell him how to spend it.
He can blow it on coke,
for all you care. All you care
about is your change. No wonder
the ex-Communists are dizzy. In
the old Soviet Union
there was nothing to buy,
nothing to spend. It was freedom
of a kind, but not our kind. We need
money, the dull electric thrill
when the automatic teller spits out
the disposable receipt.

"Money" by John Updike, from Americana and Other Poems. (c) Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.