These past few days I and the family have been in the north. When you leave a city whose name means strength for a the wide expanse of a wetland 300 kilometers away, you gain more than in the wheel rotation count of your automobile. When viewed from space, the Ebro Delta looks like the [...]
Day before yesterday we returned to an aforementioned river. This time the trail was significantly less strenuous, traversing hills of rosemary and lavender, an occasional spruce of thyme. It’s green mountains folded clean as origami, and my shoes are brimming with water, squirming as I make my way around crags and gullies. I’m carrying lunch [...]
I spent yesterday afternoon eating udon in my mother’s office. Afterwards my brother and I lie on the floor, surrounded by mannequins and furniture catalogs. Though my mother works in the design department, she is not involved in design; she does the innovative business shebang. Still, whatever an innovative business room looks like, it can’t be [...]
Someone needs to do for Emma what Nabokov did for Lolita. I am sorry, but I am no Janeite, and I hanker only for old Russian magic, Baba Yaga in a glade of silver birch, Count Leo in chalk blue and boots. Actually I am not sorry at all. Why is every Emma a Venetian [...]
There are three bookstores here in Valencia that I like. The first is our local Fnac (though only the lefthand corner of the upper echelon of any Fnac is dedicated to literary pursuits), the second a Mom & Pop place called KandA and the third the quaintly, if somewhat mundanely, named Casa del Llibre in [...]
We went on one of those river hiking thingamabobs today, five hours of trekking through glorious waters and golden views and continually falling on my face. O grace, how you elude me! By the end of it I had stripped to a turquoise bathing suit, sopping shirt slung over one shoulder, warbling the “I’ll Make [...]
And so I am home and camp was a million different kinds of brilliant, and star-gazing in a waterless lake and falling hard and fast and mad in love with writing, all over again. But I am home again, and I’ve to work. In fact, today was the first day of my summer internship, and [...]