drmstream[writing]

The woods ran up to the edge of the pond and every Spring the snow melt would reveal old trees that had crashed to the ground in the Win­ter freeze. We would pick our way around the sod­den husks, pull rot­ten rot­ten branches loose and talk about which trunks would dry out firm and hard […]

Some­times when I talk I hear my voice echo­ing in my head so I stop. In mid-gesture, mid-sentence, I’ll stop and go fol­low the echo. The moment that I am in — that absolute instance of inter­ac­tion — is sep­a­rate and unique from any other moment and I want to com­mu­ni­cate in a pre­cise and fresh way. The […]

A few heads turned, like ani­mals at a water­ing hole. Then a few more, and they started to walk, these hip­pos and rhi­nos, egrets and water boars, zebras and ante­lope that we were packed with onto the sear­ing hot strip of sand between the crash­ing waves and the clut­tered edge of the Del­marva Penin­sula. T. […]

He returned to the other point of view — oppo­site to that of his love and of his jeal­ousy, to which he resorted at times by a sort of men­tal equity, and in order to make allowance for dif­fer­ent even­tu­al­i­ties — from which he tried to form a fresh judg­ment of Odette, based on the […]

I don’t get much traf­fic in this cor­ner of the web. Google sends me a hand­ful of vis­i­tors a day, and I some­times feel guilty that my mus­ings are prof­fered as the answer to a spe­cific ques­tion. A cou­ple of posts reg­u­larly deliver vis­i­tors: my thoughts on Joyce’s last para­graph from The Dead, a poem […]

“You will per­ceive by the res­o­nance of the place whether the area is large or small, whether you are in the mid­dle or in a cor­ner.” Emile Jean-Jacques Rousseau What rel­e­vance does this quo­ta­tion have for the life of the soul, the long tra­verse of sen­sa­tion, expe­ri­ence and reflec­tion that makes up the total­ity of […]

She sat at the back table by the big air vent that had never worked, some­times nurs­ing a cup of cof­fee, other times mov­ing quickly through an egg cream and a cup of soup with a look of vora­cious sat­is­fac­tion. Once or twice, she and Renee, the coun­ter­man, mur­mured to each other, leav­ing Renee with […]

via ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity is up there on the hill where St. Luke’s was in 1900. (St. Luke’s is still on Ams­ter­dam, just not so promi­nent.) But, three-quarters of a cen­tury later, the bucolic vista had turned into a dark, tan­gled park of vio­lence and intrigue that was bor­dered on its west side by a […]