‘How did the world begin?’ asks the child. That is the very first question of all, liquid and innocent. The words themselves begin a world, putting history to a stop and breaking time’s arrow. Therein, creation stirs anew, and the mind and the world. The child is eternal in us, and its question too. When […]
TCBIII: I’d like to start with a question about audience. I recently watched a Toni Morrison interview in which she was recounting her time as an editor at Random House. She mentioned that she was looking for authors, black authors, who were not writing to the specter of a white audience, “the white gaze.” The […]
Labor: work is making. Work is making something that was never there before and having an investment in its production. That is, work is the business of making the world. Think what you have made. My mother made me, pushed my fat head from her stretched lips with a cry of doped pain and relief. […]
I suppose I’d asked the question, though my mother was certainly frank enough to initiate such a discussion, or to lead it there. It’s unlikely she said anything about “when a man and woman are married,” because I found out at seventeen that my six older brothers and sisters were all bastards, the folks having […]
Imagine not just the scariness, but the magic of it, in the context of human history: that in the twentieth century a person can be deposited on a pinprick of dirt in the middle of a wilderness, and within three minutes – in the time it takes a kid to pee and zip up – […]
When it’s my turn, what shall I do? You shall step into the antiseptic room on your own power, your Buster Brown shoes scuffing the tiles with purpose, as though eager. You shall not look around for things to fear that you don’t want to see, but lift yourself quickly onto the paper protected examining […]
