Month: February 2012

• February 23, 2012

  ‘I fear I am becoming an old man already…’

  I fear I am becoming an old man already. I keep a spare tissue wedged down in the two finger nook of my pocket. Sometimes it is crisp from use or age, and when I am hard up I do not think twice of tearing off a jagged piece of toilet paper from the half-used…
• February 22, 2012

  Late afternoon, the fugitive stillness

  There’s a moment, not long, sometime after late afternoon but well before twilight. It’s not like the early morning before the signs turn to face you and the feet clap up the stairwells. It’s not like the “dead of night” or the “dead of winter” when stillness is near universal and the “streets are empty.”…
• February 21, 2012

  On changes to the MCAT and on what makes a good doctor good

  On Friday, one of the headlines in The Chronicle of Higher Education caught my eye: “Medical-Admissions Test to Look More Broadly at Who Will Be a Good Doctor.” The article states that, as of 2015, the MCAT, the nation-wide exam that is administered to students who hope to attend medical school, will be making some significant…
• February 20, 2012

  ‘I arrived a bit early…’: How Susan made it to Chinatown

  On Tuesday night in the hours before the rain came, she’d brought Sigrid Nunez’s Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag over to my place (to read part 1 of the story, go here or simply look one column over to your right) and placed it on the orange chest next to my copies of Seneca’s letters…
• February 18, 2012

  Sontag tells a joke: An excerpt from Sempre Susan

  The following excerpt is lifted gently out of Sigrid Nunez’s Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, New York, Atlas, 2011, pp. 82-3. Here is how the book fell into my hands. I found the receipt tucked between the final page and the dust jacket. It says that the book was purchased from McNally Jackson on…