He pulled over and walked back and waited for a pause in the traffic and got the phone. It was ringing. “Margaret tells me you won’t be coming home this weekend,” his wife said.

Edgar had been a theology student, and a bicycle messenger, and a junk-bonds trader, and now he was working on his master’s degree. His new ambition was to become a kindergarten teacher. He felt he needed to have a master’s degree in order to teach in a kindergarten.

John C. Skaggs was born in Green County in 1805, thirteen years after Kentucky became our fifteenth state. His son, Ben Skaggs, was born in 1835 in Bald Hollow and married Missouri Ann Carter.

Let’s suppose you are a serious person, or you transmit to yourself certain conventional signals of a sort of seriousness: you reread Tacitus, you attempt to reread Proust but it can’t be done, you listen to Bartók and to Archie Shepp.

Also: You can’t stop moving your bowels, or your body can’t. You have a body, you are a body. You don’t know what’s safe to eat these days, or when.

 

“I was doing okay until my parents lost their house in Florida to Hurricane Ian the same month my girlfriend was diagnosed with cancer.”

“There’s not much I like better than driving in this country.”

“I read the book. A mistake. I make a lot of them.”

“The way the future used to be.”

“No culture consumed today. Closed until further notice.”

“The classic breakdown ages are nineteen and forty. Now I had a pair, like silver candlesticks.”

  Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? —Donald Trump, as reported in The Washington Post   Q. What is a “shithole”? A. It is an anus. Life is painful and full of disappointment. The French psychoanal…

“Coherence,” says Lispector, “I don’t want it any more. Coherence is mutilation. I want disorder.”

J.D. Daniels watched Event Horizon, a terrible 1997 sci-fi movie, only to discover its unsubtle obsession with anality and motherhood.

We’re away until January 4, but we’re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!Being the last man on Earth. On a recent Sunday evening, trying to relax, I turned on the television and saw an ad for a n…

Being the last man on Earth.On a recent Sunday evening, trying to relax, I turned on the television and saw an ad for a new comedy series called The Last Man on Earth. It wasn’t clear how everyone else had died. I had learned what I needed to know…

“To define terms at the outset, this will not be a novel so much as a series of notes toward one. Nevertheless pay attention.” —Barry N. Malzberg, Galaxies, 1975 I began vomiting somewhere over Turkmenistan. But it was not until the seco…

Last year’s Jaipur Literature Festival was exciting and boring at the same time—a death threat is exciting, but thirty death threats are boring; as Dostoevsky wrote, “Man is a creature who can get used to anything.” Salman Rushdie was sched…

At last I had begun writing my long-planned book about Captain Ahab’s doomed enterprise in Moby-Dick—about Robur’s doomed enterprise in Verne’s Maître du Monde—about the doomed enterprise of Doctor Hans Reinhardt from the 1979 science-fiction film Th…

Our Spring Revel is tonight, April 12. In anticipation of the event, The Daily is featuring a series of essays celebrating James Salter, who is being honored this year with The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize. Imagine: there is a man who likes to climb…

This is the second installment of Daniels' culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 9:00 A.M. Slept eleven hours. A dream of my desk, very clean, nothing on it but a flower, inkpens, my hourglass. After waking, I arrange the desk to m…

DAY ONE 9:00 A.M. July is now nearly over. And what have I done with it. My neck hurts. Slept ten hours last night after a three-hour nap yesterday afternoon. I’m overtrained. 9:45 A.M. A letter to H about The Web’s new record, Clydotorous …

It’s late. You take Sidney Bechet’s “Apex Blues” off the turntable and switch on the television. The private eye on the screen is doing more or less as you are: Ravel on his record player, his revolver in the open desk drawer, his whiskey in …

I entered psychoanalysis because I felt I was ­becoming intolerable to the people around me. I loved them, and they deserved better. 

A couple of years ago I joined one of those clubs where they teach you how to knock the shit out of other people. The first lesson is how to get the shit knocked out of yourself. The first lesson is all there is. It lasts between eighty and a hundred years, depending on your initial shit content.