like an evil parent
Americans who come into our real town are either surprised or disappointed or both. They see some of us sitting on the curb smoking Sweet Caps, wearing tube tops, and they don't like it. They pay good money to see bonnets and aprons and horse-drawn wagons.
A tourist once came up to me and took a picture and said to her husband, now here's a priceless juxtaposition of old and new. They debated the idea of giving me some money, then concluded: no.
I speak English, I said. The artificial village and the chicken evisceration plant a few miles down the road are our main industries. On hot nights when the wind is right, the smell of blood and feathers tucks us in like an evil parent. There are no bars or visible exits.
- MIRIAM TOEWS, "excerpt: 'A Complicated Kindness,'" new york times January 23, 2005
posted January 23, 2005 in printthe love broken pieces of a vase feel for the glue
[John] Donatich is the director of Yale University Press and his wife is the literary agent and writer Betsy Lerner. They are very different types. Donatich, external and gregarious, was raised in New Jersey by immigrant Croatian parents, while Lerner, the child of a Jewish middle-class family, always had an internal personality. They fell in love when he, following up on a friendship they had formed at a poetry workshop, visited her at a psychiatric hospital she had checked herself into; she has a history of manic-depression, recounted in her book, "Food and Loathing." (Lerner is always called "B" in "Ambivalence," as if the book were a case study.) Donatich's attraction to Lerner is the love a boy good at technical things finds in an almost insolvable puzzle, while her love for him is the love broken pieces of a vase feel for the glue.
- D. T. MAX, "'Ambivalence, A Love Story': The Good Husband," new york times january 23, 2005
posted January 23, 2005 in print