What makes a place familiar? What makes a visit feel like a return? Part of the familiarity is knowing what I can or cannot do in a place—the rights and duties the place affords me. In the place I am now writing about, one of my rights is the right to pray. I have the…
Category: Writing
Joan Didion, Grief, & Attention
In her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion describes the sudden loss of her husband, John G. Dunne (1932–2003) due to a heart attack. While reading it, what caught my attention more than anything else is Didion’s attention to details. The book is full of dates, numbers, names, and locations. Here is one…
Bird by Bird (Anne Lamott)
In a recent trip to the nearby bookstore, I bought two books. One of them is Terry Eagleton’s How to Read Literature and the other is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. I just decided to right-click and to add “Lamott” to my browser’s dictionary, not just because I was…
Psychology as Counter-Discipline: On Introducing Oneself
What is a good way to introduce yourself to someone? I hadn’t given this question much thought. But I started asking it when I received Rachel Haywire‘s tweet, “Where can I get an introduction to your work?” Is there an introductory place in my work? A place appropriate for new friends and interlocutors? I can…
On Arguments (Part 3)
In the first post in this series, I wrote, “a shopping list is not an argument”. This is a useful point of reference for us in understanding arguments, and the practice of argumentation. Now in this post we want to imagine a way in which a shopping list can turn into an argument. Or, at…