Away We Go But We’re Still Here

Dear CF,
I’m choked up with thoughts. I’ve started five letters to you and finished none of them. This I want to fix. So much to talk about: let’s start with Away We Go, which I finally watched.
I’d forgotten that Eggers and wife wrote the script. The moment those credits flashed on the screen I understood [...]

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Wooing Woozie

Dear Millicent,
Just found out that Mitchell and Webb are near-ish our age.   They also induced me to join Twitter, just so I can follow their daily musings.  I am starting to see the allure of Twitter, it offers a strangely intimate access to the faraway. So far, I follow them and my  mum, and [...]

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Girltalk and Boytalk

I like Roseanne because it gives both genders enough rope to believably hang themselves. The NY Times ran a depressing article yesterday on sexless marriages. Here’s how Roseanne deals with the problems of bad sex and no sex in marriage. Jackie’s Fred “gets in the elevator but won’t go down” post-baby, Roseanne is pregnant and [...]

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American Idle: How Fear and Anger Drive Us To Our Fallen Work

Dear CF,
[Opening insult framed in sexual terms that broadcasts author's failure to properly express anger:] Those radio guests can suck my boob.
[Agreement plus fake announcement of topic]: I’m with you: anger and fear, weirdly understood as alienating or paralyzing emotions, are no such thing—if anything, they’re over-activating. Without anger, fear and their cousins discomfort and [...]

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Crooked Piece of Man. Or, Odd Saint: Sir Thomas Browne

Sir Thomas Browne was born in 1605 in London’s Cheapside. He went to Oxford, became an apprentice-physician, but stayed invested in religion and what it meant to be a religious practitioner of the healing arts. He ponders—often thoughtfully and sanely—his own temptation to follow typically “Catholic” conventions, like kneeling or removing his cap in church, [...]

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Wedunlocking the Never-Ending Story

Dearest CF,
That’s an extraordinary passage. It hits home. I want to add, parenthetically, that I agree with your parallels to Alice Munro, and I’m surprised she hasn’t traversed that territory more than she has. She comes close, I think. But the type of wife that comes closest–dulled by habit and nearly (though not quite) unaware [...]

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