Eli S. Evans: Is That It

The other day a card arrived: a picture of mother, father, and child, teeth bared, cheeks pulsing with fresh blood. The baby looks more like him, with that nearly translucent-white skin.

While writing my master’s thesis on DeLillo’s Underworld, I reached a strange level of intimacy with the book.

Panther Hollow hasn’t seen any panthers since the 19th Century. As Oakland increasingly became a cultural waystation ...

I was carrying a copy of the Bengali poet Binoy Majumdar’s Hashpatal Thhekey Lekha Kobitaguchho (Poems Written from Hospital) with me...

Growing up poor and bored, their childhood was pitiable but also strangely enviable. The anecdotes they recounted to us seemed to be not that bad at all...

by D.H. Lawrence Post-mortem effects? But what of Walt Whitman? The ‘good grey poet’. Was he a ghost, with all his physicality? The good grey poet. Post-mortem effects. Ghosts. A certain ghoulish insistency. A certain horrible pottage of human parts. A certain stridency and portentousness. A luridness about his beatitudes....

Throughout the developed world, many of the dead find no release from their previous social obligations and work lives...

Three years ago I spent an afternoon with Barbara in her home on University Avenue in Providence, talking a little about the past but mostly about the future, especially politics.

I can’t pick up the clothes. I can’t explain the granite of that “can’t” to anyone else, the way it feels impossible to beat. Look at me looking at the pile and you will think, Just pick it up. For fuck’s sake.

Life experienced narratively, which is to say the only way actual life can be experienced, continually deletes the immediacy of the transitory, but in depicting the specifically of the second within the crystalline moment artists reendow the present with meaning.