Andrew McDonald

Tuesday 146: Poem

Success For a novelist, means the ability to call one book a failure. For the poet, means you are allowed to be quaint.

Tuesday 145: Thought while running

I'll be brief: In more than one of David Foster Wallace's works, he features a consumer product used for some reason other than its intended use. I wouldn't call it a preoccupation, but it's approaching motif status: In the long short story

Tuesday 144: What we'll talk about when we talk about what it was like

To fall asleep lately, I've been listening to a BBC podcast called "In Our Time," in which the host--the placid, grandfatherly voiced Melvyn Bragg--engages various scholars and academics in discussions of popular history, science, the humanities, and other general curiosities. Subjects include the 30

Tuesday 143: Odds n' the end

Picking up the pieces on a rainy Wednesday. I found myself listening to the experimental band The Books the other day, and watched a short documentary about their process. An animating preoccupation that drove the music was conversation—the idea that any juxtaposition is really a discourse. You put one

Tuesday 142: Paperlife

I have a tried-and-true method for pursuing things that require some willpower: Start early, and don't anticipate. When I started running consistently, it was late fall. The holidays were right around the corner, and with them the new year, which was an obvious time to adopt

Tuesday 140: Annoying

I recently finished Tell Me Everything, by Elizabeth Strout, a novel that follows episodes in the middle aged lives of characters in Strout's fictional town of Crosby, Maine. I didn't really like the book that much, but I'd say what I found a bit

Tuesday 139: Poem

Lunch Someone stole my jacket once in this café straight off the back of this teak chair and here we are again scanning the menu QR code at the white table ordering just coffee for now thanks and the beautiful waiter vanishes into yellow air wind dull against our faces

Tuesday 138: Poem

Breaking news They let me know over the phone, while I was walking: There was an issue at the parade.   You always had me so calm in a crowd   I’d be this pelt cap tight in the mayhem of girls, breathy moth-like in skirts,   melting. Their voices important,

Tuesday 137: A new home

Hi! It's been awhile. I'd explain, but what would be the point? After more than 10 years in New York, I moved to Mansfield, Conn., which pains me as a native Bostonian, because Connecticut sucks. Yes, it's beautiful here. I'm seeing birds