Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife
pocket.co:extract_focal()/https%253A%252F%252Foxfordamerican.org%252Fmedia%252Fpages%252Fmagazine%252Fissue-124-spring-2024%252Fdon-t-bleed-on-the-artwork-notes-from-the-afterlife%252F4a6532ea62-1710515183%252F1800_empire_cc-cropped-w1848h1505-x68y48-600x-crop-x-0-5-y-0-5.jpg)
Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife
Every morning, no matter how late he had been up, my father rose at 5:30, went to his study, wrote for a couple of hours, made us all breakfast, read the paper with my mother, and then went back to work for the rest of the morning. Many years passed before I realized that he did this by choice, for a living, and that he was not unemployed or mental
... See moreAnne Lamott • Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
They are just so many stories patched together, so many forgotten days encased in bone and meat. One might unearth almost anything with enough searching. Being a muse is mostly this—a sifting through of memories to find something of merit, hauling it to the surface where it can shine. The endeavor has, at the best of times, an exotic appeal. Forget
... See moreAnjali Sachdeva • All the Names They Used for God
My father had passed away just three weeks earlier and I was, unsurprisingly, a disaster. His death was a total shock; I spoke to him on a Friday night and by Sunday afternoon he was gone. People who haven’t lost a parent have asked me what it feels like, and I can only describe it like this: The first piece of reality that you learn in your life i
... See moreTom Scharpling • It Never Ends: A Memoir with Nice Memories!
When I spotted her, she was framed by a work more brutal and beautiful and even more truthful than the one I had found. It was painted by a master called Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, a Florentine working in the fourteenth century. Against a featureless gold background, it depicted a young man who was very beautiful but bluntly dead, supported bodily b
... See morePatrick Bringley • All the Beauty in the World
A neighbor was suing my father over some property dispute during his illness, but if you tried to talk to him about such practical matters he’d just sing you old songs like “A Bird in a Gilded Cage” in a silly, quavering falsetto until you gave up. He cared less about things that didn’t matter and more about the things that did. It was during his i
... See moreTim Kreider • We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons
That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes an
... See more