Monthly Archives: July 2010

Hello. I have an idea. Being the arrogant book-skimmer the internet has made me, I tell myself that I know what Cutting Through Spiritual Materialsm is about. But the truth is I’ve only torn through pieces of this book in brooding little fits, usually when some LA or Mysore bliss monkey has raided my house […]

It’s a tiny bandwidth, the culture represented here at the largest fair in North America. The parameters: midwest-middlebrow home and body adornment, made from clay, wood, wire or glass, early twenty-first century period, with a touch of what the natives call panache. But this narrowly specific style has concentrated here and reproduced, booth after booth booth. All […]

Yesterday morning, taking a cup for tea, I’m standing by recycle bins where the old-man-ghost floats at night. It’s warm and still, windows open to natural light and a little breeze. And I’m playing the kitchen sink transcendence game: leaning on the meaning of life like a stuck baddha konasana, until it goes crack and […]

Or, Lucy and the Eye with Rhinestones. Art Fair is coming. It’s a craft fair so powerful they call it art. Take Ann Arbor’s baseline homeyness—characterized by my corner coffeeshop, which sells cute, fluffy edibles called “pasties” and decorates with home-made wire sculptures of imaginary animals—and factor in an invasion by thousands of crafters: the […]

Bees in the eves. We smashed up their nest, which appeared in the corner of a high gable the same evening I read Nick Flynn’s cycle of bee poems. Narasimhan says insect homocides describe the margin of violence natural to householding, so there’s no reason to get dramatic about it. But destroying the nest felt […]