I knew I was in the vicinity of a serious lesson, if not about how to live life, then at least how to put some poetry into your craven retreat from it.

Stuff me in a tutu and let’s screen experimental videos all day.

I’d become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody’s error in judgement.

People gave names to things so they could tell stories about them, goddam fairy tales about children who got out alive.

Of All the Gin Joints is one part cinematic history, one part old Hollywood weirdness, and one part handy basic bar guide, with a dash of romance and more than a few wry twists. Bailey and Hemingway prove themselves very entertaining cultural mixologists.

I bought an energy bar, and as I ate it a great weariness came over me.

Write what you know. Write what you don’t know. But most of all, write what you’d rather not know.

Dept. of Speculation is gorgeous, funny, a profound and profoundly moving work of art. Jenny Offill is a master of form and feeling, and she gets life on the page in new, startling ways.

This country was built on the backs of dudes who drank on buses. What we do honors them.

Everything’s weird if you stare at it.