I can’t conceptualize the poverty. None of us can. How do you make something of yourself in a new country when you came here with nothing?? When you’ve been starving for years in your own country and come here to a land with so much food, so much sweet smelling, fattening, beautiful food . . . and you with no money to buy it.
(nonfiction)
Imprisoned behind glass in New York City’s Jewish Museum: a sinister grin in graphite. Too big-teeth and hairy brows crowned with a jester’s coxcomb. “I wanted something visually exciting,” Jerry Robinson said of his concept sketch of The Joker. “I wanted something that would make an indelible impression, would be bizarre, would be memorable.”
(nonfiction)
Solve this problem: Your daughter’s playing with a doll, a gift she just received from a friend. The doll is white.1968: John Carlos gives the black power salute Arthur Ashe wins the first US Open. 1970: Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye the problem of “whiteness” as a standard of beauty Arthur Ashe wins the Australian Open. 1972: Bettye Saar The Liberation of Aunt Jemima 1975 the liberation continues Arthur Ashe outthinks Connors to win Wimbledon “no matter what I do, or where or when I do it, I feel the eyes of others watching me, judging me.”
(nonfiction)
It all seemed too much to successfully handle, but there was nothing else to do.
(nonfiction)
It isn’t genteel to point out, but spit can be beautiful. It’s an ordinary beauty—the parabola, the clearly practiced skill.
(nonfiction)
There’s a telephone. Three syllables, telephone, so it’s the kind with the handle—you could bring it from room to room only with the help of long cords, like a medical attachment of saline. Its speaking and listening parts imitated your own. Meeting in a kind of lonely kiss: plastic, teeth, cartilage, bone.
(nonfiction)
What is it about jazz that grabs me, calms my spirit, focuses my mind? I enjoy jazz almost every evening. It is my tranquilizer after the cares of the day. It provokes memory and imagination and relaxation. It shows that there is no monopoly on joy.
(nonfiction)
Whenever I heard “Michael Cohen” it was if it were a name not my own.
(The Loop)
Sometimes pain blunts my memory of myself.
“The safest way for you to golf is with a physician by your side,” he replied.
