Recently I read Nabokov’s Pale Fire for the first time. I was on a long train journey, and long train journeys are ideal for reading; so I launched into Nabokov’s strange tale of poets and Zemblan monarchs-in-exile and hired assassins and madmen. It is a deeply strange, sometimes funny, often maddening, fearsomely clever and—I confess—not…

To kick off proceedings for the month, here’s a short story from my current work-in-progress, a “novel of sorts” called A Book of Changes. This particular novel is a strange hybrid of a beast—in part a selection of stories, in part a series of travel and memoir pieces and in part a kind of philosophy…

Well, it’s April — the cruellest month and all that — and rather than breeding lilacs out of the dead land (whatever that might involve), or mixing memory and desire, or doing any of the other things that literary types should be getting up to in April, I’m going to be spending the next few…

I gave my design students at MICA the assignment “Observe and React.” They had to observe the actions of three strangers on three occasions. They had to describe the events and then react to the events in separate paragraphs numbered one through six. Jinhwan Kim is a Korean design student who speaks English as a…

In the spring of 2011, I taught the senior thesis class at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Mel Werschky, a senior illustration major from Italy (English is his second language), chose to illustrate 1984, the novel by George Orwell. I commented on Mel’s rough draft of his thesis essay, and then we exchanged…

As designers, we fill our rooms with objects that meet our design standards, formally or functionally, but we typically ignore the design of the first thing we see when we wake up: our alarm clock. Before the age of LCDs and LEDs, nixie tubes were the preferred way of electronically displaying numbers. Made of a…

I love PaperMate Sharpwriter #2 pencils. I have always been a doodler. From the time I could write, I have always sketched something. Little arrows and asterisks surround my to-do lists. Somehow I think that doodling around the thing that I’m actually supposed to be doing will help it get done. For most of my…

I pick up a stick and scratch my name in the dirt. I flick open a knife and carve my name into the picnic table. I piss my name in the snow. I toe my name in the sand. I am here and I made this. See? Look at it. This proves it. I was…

“I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” — Jane Austen on Emma + “Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don’t care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade — demons placed there merely to…

“The story, in the first draft, has put on rough but adequate clothes, it is ‘finished’ and might be thought to need no more than a lot of technical adjustments… It’s then, in fact, that the story is in the greatest danger of losing its life, of appearing so hopelessly misbegotten that my only relief…