I have realized this week how terribly I am led to tease people. It’s a very bad habit that I got from my father, but since I never had much of an ego of my own, and was teased mercilessly and cruelly all throughout my childhood, it feels to me as though teasing, of the [...]
Archive for the ‘Words’ category
End-of-year playlist: what year is it, again?
Today I really loved my job. In the morning I taught Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, which takes place in the summer of 1985, when the narrator is 15. (The book’s climax, if it can be called that, is the day that Lisa Lisa—and Cult Jam!—come into the ice cream shop where the narrator works and [...]
How I came to be the last man on earth
It’s usually in times of emotional distress (like December through March, for example) that I start thinking about what it would be like to be alone on earth. I should say it’s functioned as a fucked up escape fantasy for me for a long time, an alternative to stepping into the street and knocking men’s [...]
Notes from Downtown
Not too long after those marches we went to in DC that so effectively stopped the war in Iraq, a friend of mine said one of those sentences that got pasted on my brain like a bumper sticker*. “Chanting in unison,” he said, “makes me ambivalent about, oh, just about everything.” I had felt this [...]
Pedagogy of revision
No one’s students are sadder than mine right now. Around the middle of the semester, everyone is getting back grades for their first really major assignments, and no one’s particularly joyful about them. College is hard! And we should be challenging them to raise the stakes; that’s our job. I take that task seriously, in [...]
No crying inside baseball
The conference date was approaching, and my paper wasn’t finished. To be honest, it wasn’t exactly started. Months before, I had drafted an irresistible abstract. I reread the two major texts I promised to discuss. As the weeks ticked by, some critical articles arrived via interlibrary loan. Some online research got done in the wee [...]
Ordinary adventures
My head is wrapped in a towel as I sit down and face the mirror. As she unwinds and reveals the results of the eye-burning wait, my hair tumbles out: the usual brunette, now with two banana yellow stripes along each side of my face. Not what I was expecting. My son is in the [...]
Wrong!
You may choose to imagine the title of the post uttered as by John McLaughlin. “Wrong!” I like really wrong covers. I’m not talking about “oh wow did they really do a [genre] cover of [song in aesthetically incompatible genre]?” That used to be edgy, man, but it’s so done. The bluegrass cover of “Single [...]
The interloper
Dealing with the shoebox was the hardest thing Jessie had ever done. For two days now it had been an unwelcome presence under her bed; she could barely sleep with it there. Every time she remembered it, something twisted inside her gut and she felt like fleeing out the back door, into the snowy woods. [...]
