Her children were convinced that she would be crushed by a tower of books, asphyxiated by a sudden dust-storm, or devoured by vermin, who must have bred multitudinously somewhere inside the chaos she called home. But to her eyes, it was not chaos but the opposite – an immense, well-maintained, and scrupulously attended order. And […]
Ghosts want fiercely. That is the only prerogative of a ghost. A ghost doesn’t need to rattle cutlery, crack teacups, or slam the odd screen door to be a ghost. Wanting, however, is mandatory. Yet, in this house, the tenants would have welcomed these more conventional displays of ghostliness. They would have even preferred the […]
Needing to write oneself out of a depression. To write oneself into a character. Someone relatively freestanding and defined. A more carefully chiseled self. To escape the flab of what one was and is and would become. That was the aim, the objective. It proved hard without supports. A mad task assumed in midair. Needing […]
by Sam Buntz After the police collected Brian’s hair and toenails as evidence, they asked me what I thought. Technically, I guess it was an interrogation, though I never got the sense that they suspected me of anything. Or scratch that. They may have suspected me of something, but they had no idea what. I was, at the […]
by Sam Buntz Computers are haunted objects – but they are not haunted by the same specters that frequent the halls of Victorian mansions, Southern plantations, or castles in the deep, dark Bavarian Forest. The past haunts those locales, but computers typically present themselves as past-less objects. They are quintessentially modern and are thus defined […]
I was listening to a podcast yesterday in which the writer, Bruce Wagner, discussed releasing his new novel, The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories, in the public domain. (The book is not actually about the “Marvel Universe,” by the way). The skewed judgment of an editor, who objected to a scene in which Wagner has a sympathetic […]
by Sam Buntz Obama was a mirror in which the managerial class contemplated itself with approval. Trump is a mirror in which the same class contemplates itself with total outrage and denial. It has seen its own narcissism and been shocked and offended by the discovery. It is the “rage of Caliban seeing his own […]
10 – 27 – 2020 It occurred to me today in a narcissistic daydream that I could become an anti-influencer – an inversion of most people’s idea of an influencer. The anti-influencer just sits around in sweats, hair mussed, a pile of laundry sitting on the floor. He goes to the fridge and starts drinking […]
I decided to start treating this thing more like an actual journal – a way of noting some of the fragments that fall off my mind from day to day. This is useful and personally relieving because it frees me from any writerly obligation to stick to the point or even make sense. You are […]
by Sam Buntz The general public has always found the academic humanities to be an obscure and baffling sideshow. In the past, every now and then, a story about students behaving curiously would leak out of the gated cloisters of Brown or Wesleyan to provoke brief buzz. Someone would attempt to ban sushi from being […]
