When The Boy grew up, he would tell people — with slight hesitation, thinking first of pizza — that his favorite food of all was sandwiches. But there was a time when this was not true. There was a time when all that The Boy knew of sandwiches was what his mother made for him, [...]

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Yesterday would have been William Shakespeare’s and Anne Hathaway’s 426th anniversary. Whew. Per yesterday’s Today in Literature newsletter, which I’ve just got around to reading, we have this excerpt from Chapter 3 of Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works, “Richard Nye’s fictional send-up of their marriage”: When Mr William Shakespeare asked me that idle question as [...]

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From whiskey river: The wonder of a moment in which there is nothing but an upwelling of simple happiness is utterly awesome. Gratitude is so close to the bone of life, pure and true, that it instantly stops the rational mind, and all its planning and plotting. That kind of let go is fiercely threatening. [...]

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Despite having spent 40 years of my life in one area of New Jersey or another, and despite having gone into New York City many times, I’ve never seen the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade live. Oh, it’s been tempting, all right. I do like going to parades — something about them, their not-quite-cheesy sentimentality, their [...]

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What’s the deal with music, anyway? Why does listening to music feel so much different from listening to anything else? Why does certain music make it easier to work — and certain music make it so much harder? I’m not talking about coarse basics like volume, or instrumental-versus-vocal music. Apply enough volume, after all, and [...]

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From an article entitled “Up and Then Down,” by Nick Paumgarten, in The New Yorker‘s issue of April 21, 2008: The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had [...]

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…no, not important to you. (Er, not to denigrate your importance.) This is important to me. See, I’ve got this one recipe I cook once, sometimes twice every year. It’s a recipe for Sour Cream Pumpkin Pie. I’ve made it every year since first finding it in a “holiday recipes” brochure from an actual God-do-they-still-exist? [...]

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Somewhere within the last few weeks, I read a description of a dog’s-eye (or rather, -nose) view of the world. It went something like this: As a dog crosses the living room, it is reading the Doggy Daily News. Pretty funny. But since I’ve now had a few months’ practice walking a very olfactorily-oriented dog [...]

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The number of reasons people start up blogs probably verges on uncountable. But the most common reason — wanna bet? — is surely, “Ummm… I don’t know.” If you dig deeper, you’ll probably get something like this: “Well, I didn’t know at first. But as it’s worked out, I’m actually blogging mostly about X.” With [...]

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From whiskey river: Remember That to have the eyes of an artist, That can be enough, The ear of a poet, That can be enough. The soul of a human just pointed in the direction of the divine, that can be more than enough. I tell you this to remind myself. Every gesture is an [...]

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