David L. Ulin

Eternity in an Hour

David L. Ulin
I used to think the most foreign place I’d ever been was Three Rivers, Texas, a truck-stop town about halfway between Corpus Christi and San Antonio, where I worked on a construction crew for a few months at the end of 1979. That, or the country of Romania, which I......
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DIY

David L. Ulin
Illustration by Dana Collins Early last fall, the Mattel Co. found itself enmeshed in a controversy involving a Harry Potter tie-in, the Nimbus 2000 flying broom, which featured a battery-powered vibrating function meant to simulate the sensation of flight. What it may or may not have also simulated was the......

Daily Radical

David L. Ulin
In a two-panel sequence of Aaron McGruder’s “The Boondocks” that ran on Thanksgiving Day, a black grandfather and his two grandsons are sitting down to dinner. One of the boys, a 9-year-old would-be revolutionary named Huey, offers grace. “Ahem,” Huey declares. “In this time of war against Osama bin Laden......

Focus Pocus

David L. Ulin
The president is talking. It‘s 5:25 on a Thursday afternoon in Burbank, and I’m watching him, live from Atlanta, recite the usual platitudes about faith and patriotism, fear and fortitude, his small face glowing as the audience applauds. I keep waiting for him to talk about our strategy in Afghanistan,......
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Ghost Writer

David L. Ulin
It’s hard to be a dead writer. No matter how much you may have wished otherwise, your legacy is at the mercy of others, of your heirs and children, your literary executors, those who mean to capitalize on your work. Your files are open, your journals and rough drafts accessible,......

While You Were Sleeping

David L. Ulin
Illustration by Jason HolleyI REMEMBER ONLY TWO DREAMS FROM MY CHILDHOOD, but in both of them I'm running for my life. The first is less a narrative than a fragment, an image, really, of my preschool-age self fleeing through the streets of some nameless city with an enormous spider hot......
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Holier Than Thou

David L. Ulin
Art by Brian StaufferI SPENT CHRISTMAS ACTING LIKE A SAINT. DON'T GET ME wrong, it had nothing to do with the holiday; no, this was more a matter of circumstance, of feeling lonely because my family was out of town and at a loss for something to fill the time......
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Talking to the Machine

David L. Ulin
Art by Dave ShulmanWHEN I WAS 18, I DECIDED TO WRITE A NOVEL BY dictating it into a tape machine. The idea, as I recall, was to avoid the quagmire of writing a first draft, and jump directly to the revision stage. What I found, though, was that in seeking......
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The Inadvertent Pornographer

David L. Ulin
Art by Paige ImantaniMODERNISM HAS ALWAYS BEEN CAST AS, ESSENtially, a European tradition, one developed in reaction to the weight of history -- "a nightmare," James Joyce wrote in an early chapter of Ulysses, "from which I am trying to awake." Yet America too, for all its relative newness, has......
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The Romance of Obsolete Technology

David L. Ulin
THE FIRST TIME I SAW STAR WARS, A MONTH INTO ITS release, I found myself struck not by the special effects, nor even the story, but by the fact that the technology in the film looked so, well, jury-rigged and worn. This was machinery I could relate to, pieces of......