Comments on: About

By: The Great Whatsit » Objets mystérieux

The Great Whatsit » Objets mystérieux — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 12:20:19 +0000

[...] The urge to do something was deep inside the artist who drew this, but I’m not quite sure what. Is it an unfinished love letter? A looming threat? What does it mean to “lurk in beauty”? Was she (presumably she) making a twisted, dark literary allusion? These questions will sadly never be answered, for the drawing goes unsigned. A friend found this in a school textbook, framed it, and gave it to me for my birthday one year. [...]

By: The Great Whatsit » Identity in a state of conflict

The Great Whatsit » Identity in a state of conflict — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 16:58:22 +0000

[...] Thus, moving back south after an entire adult life spent in the Bay Area was a bit of a shock; I was always dimly aware of the north-south culture wars, but never really felt the difference until I took a job “behind the Orange Curtain” in 2001. When facing the reality of actually leaving San Francisco–something I thought I’d never do, but something the sheer wretchedness of the dot-com boom had finally made a tolerable idea right when I was on the job market–the contrast was jaggier than I feared. Orange County really did embody all those things that make people hate the state. Luckily, though, we moved to Long Beach, which any resident will vehemently remind you is in Los Angeles, not Orange, County (see JZ’s bio, for example). It’s got the beach bungalows and Spanish houses from the 1920s and ’30s that make the state appealing to me. My friends in SF were horrified at the idea of anyone choosing to live in LA, but I imagined it (after having spent very little time there) as being sort of ironic and noir, the dark side of the 1950s, as depicted in movies like “Mulholland Drive,” “Sunset Boulevard,” or that recent black-and-white film (starring Elaine’s boyfriend Putty) “The Woman Chaser.” And it is all that, and more. LA does have that impossible feel to it, when you drive down the freeway (yes, at 10 mph, I know) and pass the signs: Melrose. Beverly. Santa Monica. Silverlake. Sunset. Wilshire. Griffith Park. Hollywood. Even as a Californian, it’s hard not to feel something when reading these names that have been so glorified—perhaps unfairly so, but still—by so many forms of media. It’s just fun to live near them, just like it always gives me a thrill up north to drive by the big freeway sign reading “University of California.” The names carry part of the magic; again, the myth is in the language. [...]

By: The Great Whatsit » Collective joy: Record Club hits 100

The Great Whatsit » Collective joy: Record Club hits 100 — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 15:36:20 +0000

[...] All that time I’ve both benefitted and suffered from a sort of self-consciousness about my participation in friendships and friendship circles of my own, with their own ups and downs, tensions, reconfiguations, likenesses, differences, expansions, contractions — and, not least, their frequent celebrations. From camping to holidays to collective blogging, my friends test me and push me and expand my tastes and experiences and play roles in my life in a more dramatic way than I remember friends playing in my parents’ lives. (Of course that may have had to do with the fact that they had five more children than I do, but still — it’s hard for me to imagine my parents, at my age, caught up in some of the friendly dramas that pepper my life.) Hear that, Robert Putnam? You won’t find any of my friends bowling alone. [...]

By: The Great Whatsit » Summer monks

The Great Whatsit » Summer monks — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 18:08:43 +0000

[...] Before tenure was a luxurious issue, the motivating factor for summer research trips was “progress on the dissertation.” Working on my dissertation allowed my archival habits to form in the first place, my love of leafing through stacks of old letters. Writing about New York’s late-eighteenth-century literary culture required me to make extended trips from Boston, where we lived for most of the 1990s, to New York, where I’d stay on friends’ floors and ride subways uptown to the Historical Society, where I held fellowships for successive summers. One summer I skipped town for an additional month to Princeton, to work in special collections there. Since I’d never traveled much in my twenties — I was in school pretty much from kindergarten to my Ph.D. — I got to try out life in other locations. I knew that Prospect Park, Brooklyn, where I stayed with friends, beat Central Park West for good food, but since I was poor I subsisted on street hot dogs anyway. And Princeton in August? What was I thinking? Who’s there but the cicadas? Still, such things don’t matter when you’ve got your head stuck, 10 am to 5 pm, in boxes of manuscripts. [...]

By: The Great Whatsit » All about the ass

The Great Whatsit » All about the ass — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 11:39:55 +0000

[...] When’s the last time you thought something that was over-hyped was actually really good? It happened to me recently. It wasn’t my reaction to the new Starbucks Summer 2006 banana blend frappuccino fiasco (who green-lights this shit?) or Mission Impossible III (yeah, Lisa, wasn’t that unexpectedly fun?) or Band of Horses or Seagrams and Diet Dr. Pepper (damn that shit grows on you). No. It wasn’t those things. Recently, Trixie and I were visiting America’s midwest–specifically Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago, and Madison–and we took some pictures. Fear not, this post is not going to be a travel diary, although that would have its merits: instead, this will be a quick look at something unexpectedly (for me at least) entertaining and fun. This post is about Roller Derby. [...]