(title/concept courtesy of S. Godfree) So the year is almost over, and as with most years, I had a bunch of big plans for all the things I was going to do and change and accomplish for 2011. I don’t even much bother with the “lose five or ten pounds” one anymore, which I delude [...]
Author Archive
Till human voices wake us, and we drown
Because of a family medical history predisposing me to cancer, I have an MRI screening at least once a year, sometimes twice. Most people I mention this to express a claustrophobic terror of this experience, but I find there’s something perversely peaceful about it. Getting tucked into a heavy double layer of blankets, I start [...]
The inside/out project
You may remember the NYT magazine spread about the French street artist JR, who won the 2011 TED prize for his global innovation in pasting enormous photographs of individual faces in public places: the concrete banks of the Seine, where a giant nude reclines; metal rooftops in Nairobi, where a series of women’s eyes are [...]
Irene’s mother
Six years and a week after Katrina, New Orleans is still bustin’ open with music and oysters and muffalettas and floats and masks and slang and cocktails and friendliness. At night the street corners spill over with virtuosic brass bands. In the “right” parts of town, you’d never know anything had changed. Just like always, [...]
Bloomsday wanderings
June 16 is a day of celebration and extreme geekery for modernist lit types everywhere, but nowhere more so than Dublin, which is so explicitly and accurately mapped in Joyce’s Ulysses that if you care about it at all, it’s still possible (required, even) to trace the exact path its antiheroic protagonist Leopold Bloom walks [...]
Extra credit?
One more week of class (not counting today), and between now and then, about fifty million research papers, essay revisions, final essay exams, quizzes, crying students, university transfer acceptance stories, awards nights, frantic stories about broken printers, group presentations, indignant stories about how someone didn’t do any work in the group presentation, tearful honors ceremonies, [...]
The devolution of blasé
Celebrity author blurb on the cover of the book I’m currently teaching (meaning I have to stare at it all the time, which led me to vent in this post): “David Foster Wallace turns the short story upside down and inside out, making the adjectives ‘inventive,’ ‘unique,’ and ‘original’ seem blasé.” –T. Coraghessan Boyle It’s [...]
2010 winds down
Readers, such beautiful imaginations you have. Please use them to visualize what I wish were in this post: -photos of my parents’ Christmas decorations, all wooden toys bought at outdoor Christmas markets when we lived in Germany -photos of my niece and nephews in the canyon behind my parents’ house, running around with my dog [...]
