April 2010
28 posts
Night of the Living Dead
Later that night, my roommate brought out his bottle of vodka. I’d decided not to drink—we were attending a writer’s retreat at Lindenwood, a ministry of the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ, and it felt unseemly to get trashed with nuns nearby. My roommate was violently eager to get drunk. He poured half of the robot vodka into a thermos, called me a “faggot party-pooper”...
“This is the point: money should be used according to justice. Money must not...”
– For the record, I’m completely on board with everything Franco Moretti has to say about capitalism, as it relates to Frankenstein and Dracula, particularly the latter, in his essay “Dialectic of Fear.” I also admire how his translator pulled a word like “cumbrous” to...
WatchYesterday while constructing the previous missive, I wandered over to the university art museum where my friend Liz is performing in her installation/performance piece Snip, Snip, Cut. Then I cut some of her hair.
The installation has been up for two or so weeks now, but Liz’s hair remains relatively lustrous, and complements her face. Swaths are missing, the back is a little chunky, but no...
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A Journey with Chris Kraus
I Love Dick is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn’t afraid to burn through her own narcissism in order to assume responsibility for herself and for all the injustice in world—and it’s a book you won’t put down until the author’s final, heroic acts of self-revelation and transformation.
I was thinking about I Love Dick last night, on the drive up to...
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adult onset academia, pt. 2
Previously, a geographer and a cultural historian presented themselves to the short-order cook whom they love!
Soupy freaked out. He thought he might throw-up! He got down on his knees, not out of histrionics, and prayed to Jesus God Above for help. The very idea—his lovers simultaneously presenting their appetites before him!
“I am burning up,” he confided, just out of earshot,...
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adult onset academia, pt. 1
Soupy, the cafe’s cook, has effected two lady friends that he is attempting to hide from one another. He knows both ladies intimately; I’ve heard a great deal about this intimacy; but the two ladies know each other only through friends-of-friends. Both ladies are academics*, one in geography (South African studies), and the other in Latin American history and culture. The geographer,...
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Regarding the Pain of Others: Kick-Ass
Faithful readers, I continue dispatching from Mississippi, in the country estate of my lover, whose kitchen is so cold my nose runs and runs, more stupidly as I sip iced coffee. Now—where were we? Ah. I had disparate thoughts on a recent film…
Chris Cantoni over at brightwalldarkroom has posted a not-indepth but instructive review of Kick-Ass. Many more reviewers, not least Dana Stevens at...
sunnO)))
But I take it very seriously when I can’t listen through a full album; this recently happened with Mumford & Sons Sigh No More. Just a very sandy, generic Christian folk band from London; I want to give them more for it, but I was bored. In Indiana I was confused and bored by Mumford and Sons, especially when a young man like Sam Amidon is already making amazing—genius?—music in a quote...
tl;dr
That last post was about giving Slaughterhouse-Five to a ghost. It mentions The New Yorker, Elif Batuman, and Iraq. It also revealed that at one time I had an industrial piercing and that currently I have a sunburn.
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Untimely: What was at stake in the spat between... →
Jill Lepore tears it down in her riveting exploration of two nearly forgotten upstarts in the April 19th issue of The New Yorker (sp?):
Ross was busy nursing another grudge, against DeWitt Wallace. (Reader’s Digest’s influence on the magazine industry, Ross wrote, “gives us the creeps.”) Luce was trying to get Franklin D. Roosevelt out of office, and Wendell Willkie elected in his place; the...
Taste of Turkey →
Elif Batuman—I’ve not left her camp; did you think I had?—discusses her recent culinary adventure, upcoming in the April 19th issue of The New Yorker. Wesley Yang also gets a mention. I feel like n+1 has got this back-channel of clout steam-rolling it into your hearts, even if you’ve never picked up the magazine.
The Final Cylon
Anecdotes! Because I don’t have a diary and I haven’t disposed of these in an email somewhere:
—On Saturday night me and Todd (older brother) went to see “Date Night.” At the ticket counter I told the young female worker, “We’re seeing “Date Night”… on our date night.” Todd was mortified. He wouldn’t sit next to me in the movie to...
closure, only not really, with grad school
Having waited to hear back from one last grad school has made me feel like a sucker for too long, so yesterday I called admissions. The admissions lady, a sweetheart, with comfort and understanding in her voice, apologized and said that in fact, the department I was applying into hadn’t gotten back with admissions yet. No one knew but them! —If they, the department, even knew. She gave me a...
Moral Combat →
Homosexuality is the key to E. M. Forster’s personal life, but not to his work. For that we must look to his desire to grapple with the contradictions and dangers of living the moral life.
This is one sentence, pretending to be two, riding that hope, as it may, on a colon:
“The confusion only increased with the appearance of Maurice and The Life to Come, as revisionist sentiment...
Thirties Somethings →
Gerald Howard on a new dual biography of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenny, “Lonelyhearts,” by Marion Meade:
“He was extravagantly admired by a coterie of critics and intellectuals, but for years he scraped by as a contract screenwriter. Their early demise (she was twenty-seven, he thirty-seven) was overshadowed by the death by heart attack the day before of F. Scott Fitzgerald,...
my cup runneth over
Despite a rejection letter this evening, I’ve learned five more letters of the Cyrillic alphabet (I’m up to 25!) and Connor is using all five of his tiny fingers to hold onto/push away/hold onto/push away my one index finger. My nose is running. And running this evening I was chased by two miniature pinschers—maybe I’m the best part of their day; they enter into the totality of...
