One evening this last summer, I went to an ice cream shop in St. Paul. I went with a good, longtime friend with a long list of things to talk about. We got our ice cream, then sat down outside to enjoy the evening. My summer leading up to this point, however, had not been so peaceful. I had been working a monotonous delivery job … Continue reading Something in Nothing: My Summer of Silence
When I stepped into The Blossom Shop in downtown Hillsdale, I had no idea that I was entering a war zone in the global economy. It hardly seemed like embattled territory. I learned that tulips are a dollar a stem. They’re shy in the cold, but once you take them from the refrigerator and set them on your kitchen table, they’ll open right up. They … Continue reading The Flower Industry
This past July on a warm summer afternoon, I attended a family friends’ poetry night—a classy little shindig with hors d’oeuvres, heels, sophisticated people, and, of course, poetry. A few months later, one of these poems unexpectedly resurfaced in a conversation with a friend. It was a poem entitled “A Fair World Tho’ a Fallen” by Christina Georgina Rossetti: You tell me that the world … Continue reading The World Is Fair, in Spite of the Old Fall
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. —Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray The video opens with a typical vlog set-up: A woman sits centered in front of the camera, her pristine background out of focus. The Scandinavian minimalist aesthetic is enough to make any 22-year-old vaguely covetous. Her platinum blonde hair … Continue reading The Rage of Caliban: Millennials and the New Aestheticism
“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” This joke is from David Foster … Continue reading Songs from the Cage
