“We’ve lived a hundred years, shouldn’t we prepare for what comes next?”

Nobody had much respect for The Labor Leader. Even Finkel and Kramm, its owners, the two sour brothers-in-law who’d dreamed it up in the first place and who somehow managed to make a profit on it year after year 

At the interview, they had not wanted to know about my degrees or my years of teaching experience, only about “Peace Research.” “Tell us about ‘Peace Research,’” they said. I began the only way

Confronted by the tetanic twitching of his individuality under the smooth skin of teamwork, I saw all the more clearly what was different about him, and I knew I loved him because I liked him better than the others.

My father comes into my room. “Look,” he says. He carefully opens his hands: a luminous, gold-colored butterfly sits in the bowl of his palms, like a light he has carried into the dark room.

Their standard pattern of operation involved making a sum of money, losing it, and then starting over.

I worked nights as a phone operator, and it was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. The money wasn’t good, but it wasn’t awful either, and although the place looked inhospitable—a cramped office on Guardia Vieja, whose only window looked out on an immense gray wall—it was a pleasant place to work: not too cold in winter or too hot in summer.

There are three elements to the photograph. There is the grocery cart in the background, the white Renault hatchback in the foreground, and then at center there is the reclusive philosopher who explored literature’s impossibility. 

Marilyn Minter was a photography student at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, in 1969. 

For a long time I worked on an essay about a fairly obscure American film made in the seventies by an actress, the only film she directed, which she starred in herself, an essay that I published in a small journal and thought perhaps I would turn into a book.