story: “The Moons of Jupitar”
author: Alice Munro
year: 1977 (I read it in the Vintage Books Edition of 2004)
where: Quarantine / Dubai apartment
note: This is probably the longest I’ve gone without updating this. That is not to say that I have not been reading and writing; quite the opposite! We can all agree that time has been strange these last months. In many ways, a tension has grown between stillness and movement, and about what we should and should not be doing.
For the last three years, university teaching has afforded me the opportunity to spend my summer months researching, reading, and writing wherever I want. I’ve taken full advantage of this by spending swaths of time in Europe, Australia, North America, and East Asia. This year that has been impossible. In early March, I wrote about my feelings living in the UAE vs. USA during COVID. The essay was obsolete before the publication ran, so I pulled it. Shortly after, I reviewed Ottessa Moshfegh’s new book for a nice magazine and with all the tumult, its publication was pushed to October. That’s around the time when I decided to really focus on my larger writing and reading goals. Thus, this is a roundabout way to say that my smaller projects, such as this, have been on the back-burner. But not forgotten!
a line: “The message I got from him was simple: Fame can be striven for, then apologized for. Getting or not getting it, you will be blamed.”
note: This quote reminds me of the op-ed by Paulina Porizkova called America Made Me a Feminist.
theme(s): Father daughter, death, truth and fact
samantha Neugebauer 