[Note: Part 1 is here.] 25. Novels are hard, not like diamonds but like fate, the choice you make that reveals it was never a choice at all. 26. Then it is the novel as jailer. You in a small dark room with no answers to any of your questions and no one seems to [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘travel’
July 31, 2009
All Over the World, This Is How People Tell Stories
Tomorrow, I’m going to wake up and go buy a copy of The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy. I’ve gone too long. * * * At the gym, where I watch TV news, I could only find news on how a famous black man was arrested in his home or news of how a famous black [...]
July 21, 2009
Spata Sphinx, Athens Airport, July 14, 2009
My novel is eating everything in my mind right now, except the ability to draw. This was drawn in Athens airport. The Sphinx was found when the airport was being expanded, and is part of a group of antiquities on display there, all discovered during the expansion. We know the myth of Oedipus and the [...]
April 30, 2009
Belga
I go to Belgium, for a week, on a travel junket for food writers. In the breakfast rooms of their hotels I read the news online from my computer, which is all about how Michelle Obama hugged the Queen, and then how the Queen permitted it. Then what she wore, what Carla Bruni wore, who [...]
March 10, 2009
Most of What I Like to Do Is Indoors
1. Canada has more comics than we do, it occurs to me, as I walk through The Beguiling in Toronto. It is the best comics shop in Toronto, and perhaps in all of Canada. I pause to admire what appears to be an actual original page of a Tintin comic, framed and on the wall. [...]
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 17, 2008
Stuff Crisis
I go into the office, to send out an invoice for a magazine article, and to print up a W9 and fax it, in order to get paid for teaching at the Ocean State Writers Conference. In the summer, there’s only one person who is ever in the office besides me, whenever I go in—he’s [...]
July 6, 2008
The Message T-Shirts Of Athens
I spend 36 hours getting to Athens, and that isn’t my final destination. The first flight goes relatively well. I exit at London Gatwick at 6:25 AM, having had little sleep due to two chatty Aussie women behind me, young lovers who spent the whole night drinking vodka cocktails and talking and laughing, as if [...]
May 28, 2008
Where To Go, What To Do, & How To Have Your Best Summer Ever
I’m standing in my mother’s guest room, having just arrived for Memorial Day, when she says, Norman found these and they’re yours. Norman is my mother’s second husband, a man with an enormous capacity for helping. He’s often doing things I never thought of asking anyone to do, ever. When he suggests that I could [...]
