drmstream[writing]

I want to assure you with all earnest­ness that no writ­ing is a waste of time — no cre­ative work where the feel­ings, the imag­i­na­tion, the intel­li­gence must work. With every sen­tence you write, you have learned some­thing. It has done you good. It has stretched your under­stand­ing. I know that. Even if I knew […]

  –I’ve got to make a polit­i­cal car­toon, the sixth-grade boy says to me.  I’m going down­stairs. I’m fid­dling with my iPad and half-watching the end of the US Open.  I’m just happy that he didn’t rope me into work­ing on the assign­ment and that he’s going down to the play­room alone.  Some­times he gets […]

Don’t you love the com­mu­nity around your inter­ests and enthu­si­asms that you find on the web? You can’t repli­cate the expe­ri­ence any­where in real life: the vari­ety of view­points, the excite­ment of shar­ing and the feel­ing of val­i­da­tion that comes from con­sort­ing with peo­ple who see the world from the same angle but who are […]

Sit­ting in the sec­ond story of a two-story row house in Brooklyn’s South Slope, I searched for the voice that would tell my 21-year old daugh­ter Becky some­thing about liv­ing. She’s laid up with a bro­ken foot that’s keep­ing her from work­ing at the micro-distillery where she found a job after com­ing back from Louisiana, […]

My sense of self and my pri­vate desires got boxed in a mile high in the sky yes­ter­day. I almost didn’t make it through. I was fly­ing out to Los Ange­les for a busi­ness meet­ing. I had a win­dow seat in the front of the plane. An attrac­tive and com­posed young woman sat in the […]

I was going through my papers and found three pages of loose notes. They must be recent, but I don’t know why I made them, whether they are my own ideas or notes jot­ted down from some­thing that I read or saw. They are orga­nized but hur­ried. They com­prise a man­i­festo of sorts. I just […]

I wrote a story once about a young man who works in a tai­lor shop.  He was lis­ten­ing to the radio.  His name was Joe Gib­son.  A pretty girl comes in and he takes her mea­sure­ments.  He presses her breast.  He’s aroused and bash­ful.  She doesn’t even seem to notice.  The song Melan­choly Baby was […]

Forty-eight days, ninety-four thou­sand and one hun­dred and sev­enty words. One novel done and the other half done. When I started, I had about 14,000 words of a novel that I had been research­ing and for­mu­lat­ing for more than a year. I didn’t feel the kind of momen­tum that told me the book was going to find […]

 William Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) Le Lever Oil on can­vas 1871 106 x 145.5 cm (3’ 5.73” x 4’ 9.28”) Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum of Art (Man­hat­tan, New York, United States) Come into this pic­ture with me to find its sen­sual sub­ver­sions, its temp­ta­tions and tit­il­la­tions. Don’t begin at the young boy’s eyes. Don’t start there, no […]

What I look at in one moment doesn’t exist in the next. What I see I can’t remem­ber. I can’t see it ever again. What I try to meld comes apart, what I try to tell becomes inco­her­ent. Images con­nect and dis­con­nect like the spray­ing frac­tals of the win­ter sun­light play­ing on the ever fainter mem­o­ries that […]