There is no such thing as good advice on how to make it as a writer, other than “marry someone rich” or “be rich already

The vast ocean could not keep us apart if we only learned how to melt, golden liquid, allowing the boundary of skin porous, liquid, more receptive to the Universal waves, Universal ways, of affinity, divinity, and infinity fluidly dancing in me, thyself.,“I kept on going back to the doctor and he kept on giving me loads and loads of tablets. He thought I had pelvic inflammatory disorder,” she told me. At the hospital, a nurse smeared cold gel onto her stomach, and applied an ultrasound wand. The nurse saw the issue: “You’ve got a five-and-a-half-month-old baby in there.”,Five years later, USB-C is near-ubiquitous: Almost every modern laptop and smartphone has at least one USB-C port, with the exception of the iPhone, which still uses Apple’s proprietary Lightning port. For all its improvements, USB-C has become a mess of tangled standards — a nightmare for consumers to navigate despite the initial promise of simplicity.,As I see it, there are two ways to proceed. One way would threaten our professional ethic of free inquiry. If I must revise my teaching to conform to a popular view of inclusivity that I do not share, then my freedom of inquiry has been unfairly limited. As the literary scholar David Bromwich argued in Politics by Other Means in response to similar measures proposed in the 1990s, any school policy that requires me to affirm a position on a controversial question is effectively a loyalty oath and a threat to the academic freedom of the entire faculty, regardless of whether individual members of the faculty agree with the position.,To avoid being alone, Mitchell filled the Cage with visitors. One afternoon, she invited Kirsty Williams and her husband Neil for drinks. Neil, who was serving in the British Army, was the first to see the blood. Twenty or thirty droplets of deep red blood splattered the floor, as if dropped from a pipette, or a bleeding nose. Williams told me: “I’m a nurse. I work in cancer, in hematology. I definitely knew that was blood, but couldn’t explain it…it wasn’t there when we arrived.”,After two years in the Cage, Mitchell had given up searching for rational explanations for the strange activity. Cell phone towers, electromagnetic fields, and practical jokers were no longer feasible. She had come to terms with living alongside the spirit of “one or more witches.”,But perhaps at the administrative level this disagreement cannot be acknowledged because doing so would complicate certain positions, and even certain results, that the college leadership accepts to be true. G. Gabrielle Starr, the president of the college, recently gave an interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education in which she touted an inclusive method of teaching biology that has had a statistically significant effect on student performance. But she must know that this question is controversial in literary studies, because she and Kevin Dettmar, another colleague from the English department, participated in exactly this controversy in their response to Michael Clune in the Chronicle last year. They argued that literature professors “don’t transmit value” but instead teach “metacognitive skills” such as empathy — a tutelage they connect to the master-value of “diversity.” (A columnist in The New York Times characterized their argument as “insane.” But my colleagues are not naturally mad. There is no lunacy in them, only agreeableness.),Mitchell’s friends started to feel uneasy about visiting the Cage. “There was another incident,” Williams told me. “Vanessa felt what she described as something, or somebody, biting her ear!”,Appreciating the vast silence in the ether, in each other, instead of what the world perceives~ diamond hearts, it’s neither fair nor just, perplexed at every conjugation, bring together all feeling and all isolation, bring us together despite oceanic distance.,Everyone panicked as Mitchell searched for a credible explanation: “The first thing we’re thinking is shit, somebody has a door open, or a window open, and a cat’s come in that’s injured.” Maybe it was one of the crows that often flew inside the Cage and smashed against its windows trying to escape. But they found nothing. Mitchell took it as a warning.,Accumulation of bereavement and joy, weathered hands long for silk, up and down stipulated hilltops, placing our intrepid hands on the cold texture; opportunities to move beyond space and time.,I want my students to read Burns, Brooks, Homer, Sappho, Zhuangzi, and Kalidasa. I also want them to study ancient American art. I even think it would be a good idea for them to learn about the identities of the artists. But the identities are worth studying for the sake of the works of art rather than the other way around. To study Brooks for her racial identity rather than her extraordinary poems is a cheat. It is a way of saying: “Artistry does not belong to you. Somehow your identity got into a work of art without the intervention of an artistic intelligence. It has value because of your identity, but not as art.”,If I stopped listening to your voice, pretend you speak, I am no longer me, I am we, perhaps I noticed the change far too fast, burning cities and orange skies, too forceful in determining truth from lies, I cannot pretend that I never cared, I simply widened the distance between us.,Maybe we can bridge that gap, swim through the salt, walk through the city of a million, see them as one, concrete being, allow ourselves to be undone, fall together, into eternity, into the space of consecration.,She refused to look at the screen. Being a single parent was not in her plans. But raising a child in the Cage was impossible. “I knew that a baby’s never going to be safe in that house,” she recalled. A blind panic rose inside Mitchell. I can’t even cope with this house alone, she thought. How the hell can I do this?