Tom Jacobs is an assistant professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology, where he teaches a range of classes in writing and literature. He received a Ph.D from New York University in American Literature and lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Email: [email protected]
by Tom Jacobs We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all. —William James (1908) Years ago I found myself wandering through library stacks picking up and putting down books until I found…
by Tom Jacobs The ants are my friends, the ants are my friends, the ants are just blowing in the wind. —Lorrie Moore Life is hard and nothing makes any sense. That is a problem. I don’t know everything there is to know, and that is also a problem. These are the bare facts. Impossible…
The Simplicity of Objects or, How I learned to Love Kipple by Tom Jacobs They were the serious toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him guilty. ~ Richard Wright, “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1942) Sometimes when I step…
by Tom Jacobs – Do you know the expression, “Let sleeping dogs lie?” You are better off not knowing… – I have to know… – Very well… ~ from Polanski’s Chinatown Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost. ~ Dante So…
by Tom Jacobs Years ago an earnest young student entered his professor’s office for a brief chat about a paper topic he had been turning around in his head. The professor was esteemed and well-dressed and famous for being a cool and political yet accessible writer about cool and political things. The student was spangly…
by Tom Jacobs I have been thinking about memory quite a bit lately. More specifically, my memory and the objects of its interest and desires, and the ways that it fails or warps or enables me to see/hear/re-experience what actually happened in the past, whatever that phrase might actually mean. I mean, whatever actually happened…
by Tom Jacobs When I was sixteen or so I could throw a 12 pound spherical object, maybe, and on a very a good day, 47 feet. This was not something I ever really wanted to do, but I did it, perhaps to compensate for some vague and incipient form of masculine insecurity, perhaps to…
by Tom Jacobs There is a story that I want to tell you. It's about a man who lives alone at the edge of town. In a small house without much to recommend it. He finds that there is little for him to do other than to look out the window. Which is something that…
by Tom Jacobs I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish.…
by Tom Jacobs Nobody knows anyone. Not that well. ~ Miller’s Crossing The midnight thoughts we have when we are kids are amongst the most profound we will ever have, even if we are not in a position to understand them at the time. How do I know the color I see as red is…
by Tom Jacobs The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the…
By Tom Jacobs and Troy Hatlevig Profanity is the crutch of the inarticulate. ~ anonymous Fuck you, you fucking fuck. ~ Joe Pesci, in Goodfellas I curse a lot. I seem to drop the f-bomb more frequently than most, and I’m not sure why this is. I like the word and the way that it…
by Tom Jacobs This last weekend I went on a two-day sailing expedition with a friend. I took the subway from Brooklyn to Grand Central and got a train to Connecticut and, it must be said, had no idea what I was doing or in for (thank god my friend did—an expert sailor, this guy).…
by Tom Jacobs How many stories are born of images? All of them? Most of them? Without some founding image (of a person, of a family, of a moment) is it even possible to conceive of a story? The relation between an image and its story—all of the resistances and exchanges between these two very…
by Tom Jacobs There is the apocryphal story in which Hemingway, sitting in a bar somewhere in Key West, is asked by an antagonistic admirer to follow his minimalism to its logical outcome and to tell a story in six words. As the story goes, Hemingway picks up a napkin and writes out the following…
“To Commute,” by the Way, Can Mean to Transform (as in from Base Metal to Gold), or, The Banality and Sublimity of the Mundane by Tom Jacobs Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of…
by Tom Jacobs The sensuous world around [us] is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society; and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity of whole succession of generations, each standing…
by Tom Jacobs There is a wrongly attributed quote associated with Soren Kierkegaard that says something to the effect that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. I have found no evidence that he ever actually said or wrote this, but it is a sufficiently Kierkegaardian sentiment (by which I…
by Tom Jacobs (Apologies to Ernest Hemingway) It was very late and many people had left the establishment (although many more had arrived to drunkenly bowl and play foosball and Duck hunter). An old man sat in the slight shadows cast by the Skee Ball and Hoop Fever Basketball Arcade machine. In the day time…
by Tom Jacobs As almost every individual possesses some article which in itself is of little value, but in a collective view, becomes of real importance, the patrons of this institution solicit the attention of their fellow-citizens to the Museum, and request their aid towards forming a collection which promises fair to become an object…