This incessant, near compulsory recycling of the Midwestern flight narrative makes one thing clear: the story, the real story, begins upon departure.
Any one of us, faced with the comparative achievements and status symbols of the upper classes, can be overcome by a sense of envy and the unfairness of the world. There is always someone richer and more entitled who seems to have it all figured out.
Societally, there is a seemingly collective remorse for the treatment of women, but these memoirs are still, in ways I find unique to those of many other celebrity women, illuminating some of our culture’s most persistently problematic approaches to sex and sexuality.
Waste is what an artist is and wants: too much. An abundance. It’s what we work to shape, what we can’t handle, what we haven’t yet made plans for.
If nuclear advocates are incapable of discussing who their chosen fuel sources have harmed and might harm, they are either ill-informed and not the experts they claim to be, or they are dishonest.
“Elite” and “peers” are the key terms here, because compared to the rigid social divides in older and more traditional master/servant narratives, the class barrier between the protagonists of these novels and their employers is more porous.
Meanwhile, husbands everywhere felt vindicated. They flocked to the pubs to gloat. I told you I married an idiot!
The flesh was intact but scarred, and the silvery ring of repaired skin at the base was numb. Rubbing it felt like touching someone else’s hand.
a continent, seedless and deep
ashes that fertilize nothing
but ashes, ashes that hold
the cool river of the mind
then sink it into ashes
I hang myself out of a self-inflicted predicament
I see the world from a new perspective
and don’t cry for me when you see me on the floor
I am awakened by a smell, sweet and smoked. Clouds brisketed above the lake. Startled and unsure, I close the windows. Check first on the children.
Wright’s architectural vision was a manifest destiny of the self, a frontier for every household, a westward expansion outside every door.