Tag Archives: Michael Hornyansky

Notes On Adulthood In A Time Of Stress

Posted on March 22, 2011 | 5 comments

The day that my son was born, I knew I’d passed irreversibly beneath the lintel demarcating the antechamber of my as it then seemed trivial youth from the salon of for-keeps adulthood. I expected as much. What I did not anticipate was the arresting shock of the first time staring into the depths of a mortgage amortization table, the reckoning with the fact that you are now a name and number in someone’s file, and that this constitutes a bond backed up by the full force of the state. What was I thinking, marching willfully into this arrangement?

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Posted in Personal Essay

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The Compulsion to Write (pt. 2)

Posted on November 25, 2010 | 2 comments

In his essay, “Why I Write,” George Orwell identifies the following: 1. Sheer Egoism (“desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc”), 2. Aesthetic enthusiasm (“perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their arrangement”) 3. Historical impulse (“desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity”), and 4. Political purpose (“desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after”). Knowing that I would be writing this essay, I tried to improve upon this list, but to no success. There is only one conceivable addition, approaching the matter as a male heterosexual writer: 5. To bed women. Continue reading →

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Posted in Wayne's Picks, Writers and Writing

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