In 1966, the greatest Poe scholar to have ever lived, Thomas Ollive Mabbott, retired from his teaching post at Hunter College, elated to finally possess the leisure to pursue in earnest his long-held dream of compiling a definitive edition of Poe’s complete works. Two years later, at age 69, he had all but finished the…
Phrases of the sort “words fall short” and “it was indescribable” impute a fault to language that it has no responsibility to bear. Before going further, so as to establish a foundation on which to build, a premise all should find acceptable: the inability to convey an experience to another, to a degree that recreates…
For one reason or another, I don’t recall it being thirst or hunger, with calm collection I set to wonder at the categories of food and drink humanity has yet to discover. It may seem that the point of view implicit in such a statement is neglectfully dismissive of the plethora and variety of consumables…
Why is a grapefruit known as such, given how dissimilar it is to a grape? More importantly, why is the question framed so? It is only a small perturbation that ripples through the query’s character if the edible nouns swap places, yet the question as written is more likely to be asked than its variant….
The circumstance of customers boarding airplanes shortly after ingesting their purchases affords food handlers employed at airports the opportunity to relax their adherence to hygienic practices. These shortcuts in neglect of cleanliness, while sure to be unpopular with the randomly visiting food safety inspector, can be confidently exercised by the self-centered server, who recognizes that…
Imagine this yellow circle is a young man named Jack. Jack is friends with a young blue circle man named Jim. Being friends, Jack and Jim regularly share in each other’s company and engage in behaviors typical of friendship, such as discussing matters of mutual interest, jointly participating in recreational activities, requesting assistance of one…
Solitary walking is conducive to clearing the mind and settling into contemplation. The same is true of bicycling, albeit only for a narrower range of circumstances. The same is true of driving, albeit only for an even narrower range of circumstances. One could summarize this trend with the statement that the potential of a particular…
There are nurses from whom vaccine administration might be described as being pricked by a needle. From others the same procedure is closer in sensation to how one imagines it would feel to have driven into muscle a metal stick with barbs. It was the latter that characterized my final in a series of rabies…
Certain resources can be exploited without lessening their quantity. The idea is to mine with your eyes, to reap with your nondisruptive presence. What might one of these resources be? The forest comes to mind. No matter the number of times one stands at the edge of a neatly groomed crop field, stealing glimpses through…
Last year, while loitering in an apartment to which I’d just been granted admittance, I noticed affixed to a closet door a thin, glossy sheet of paper–a page from a magazine, removed neatly and elevated in status to an artifact more deserving of one’s attention than the other pages left behind. On the page was…
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