I sometimes have the urge in seaside towns to just take an apartment, go upstairs and rent it and close the door and write. This place is a little as if I’ve done that. I am in Florida on Manasota Key, at a residency at the Hermitage. It’s a less crowded Florida than I’m used [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘letters from away’
October 27, 2009
Go Ahead
[photo via Gothamist] 1. On the train down to New York Thursday, in the seats across from me, a 26-year-old American soccer player who works on an organic farm and a 30-something Turkish artist talk to each other for most of the trip. The soccer player tells his age when he says he feels old. [...]
August 19, 2009
“Consider Writing an 86 Proof Sentence.” – Charles Baxter
1. Saturday, I drive to Vermont with my friend Tayari, to Bread Loaf. The mosquitoes are terrifying. At a cocktail reception, as we take turns outside spraying ourselves, Sigrid Nunez advances a theory that this is because the bats are dying and are not eating the mosquitoes anymore. All up and down the Eastern seaboard, [...]
February 4, 2009
Yes, Like That
I wake up in Jayne Anne Phillips’ house in Glen Ridge after the longest night of sleep I’ve had in a while—10 hours. Waking up here for me is a little like I imagine it might be for someone else to wake up in David Bowie’s house. I walk to the bookshelves and lay down [...]
November 9, 2008
Home Again
On the plane to Paris, I read articles about a new show coming to HBO, called Americatown. It imagines a future when Chinatown-style American ghettoes have sprung up all over the world, as Americans leave, looking for greater opportunity elsewhere. I remember a taxi ride in Los Angeles a few years ago, when the driver [...]
October 17, 2008
The Ring
Perhaps, because I have just been thinking about turning my savings into jewelry I can wear, this happens. At the Southeast corner of the Louvre, on the Rue de Rivoli, a woman bends over near me as I cross the street and pulls a gold ring out of the blond dirt. She says, Mister, Mister, [...]
October 10, 2008
In Which I Go To Paris
I go to Paris. The day I leave, I go to the bank to make sure I can take out the money for the rent due on the apartment where I’ll stay, in the 1st. The woman teller is wild-eyed when she looks up. Before she says anything, I know she’s incapable of helping me. [...]
August 6, 2008
Home Again
I sit at the gate in Athens airport, Gate A5, waiting for my flight to London, and make the drawing above. The plane is delayed, and it occurs to me that as soon as I left Sifnos, everything that has started to go wrong started to go wrong. I shouldn’t have left, I tell myself. [...]
July 29, 2008
The Mermaid’s Chapel
The night before I made this drawing, I went with my friends for cocktails at the home of the former ambassador to Greece and his wife, who have a beautiful house there on the edge of Kastro, overlooking the ocean. I went outside to their patio, to take in the view of the water. This [...]
