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 right to pray despite my uncertainties and despite my faults. Perhaps I have the right and duty to preserve this…
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 example: During the twenty-four December and January nights when Quintana was in the sixth-floor ICU at Beth Israel North I…
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 irritated to see it underlined as a possible typo, but also because of how much I loved her and her…
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 search for such a place now, or ex post facto put the label “start here” on an article. But I…
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 least, we want to see how a shopping list can begin to resemble an argument. Think of a concrete shopping…