May 2011
4 posts
Strange days.
I’m around. The semester draws to a close in less than a month so I’m all work and stress. Summer has, more or less, already arrived: the warm weather both inspires and taunts.
Days in which every minute is calculated in order to maximize work generate odd moods. Caffeine, fatigue, stress, and ceaseless reading, writing, and thinking all add up to unsettle. Yet, fear not. Mostly this...
April 2011
1 post
mom house 2 mom house
I have yet to gain anything from Google Latitude besides the feeling of being a psycho-stalker.
March 2011
3 posts
Chain letter prototype, 1899.
Anyone who knows me knows I am a huge fan of the chain letter.* This week in my reading of sources from China’s Boxer Rebellion I was thrilled to come across an excellent early example of the genre. My thirteen year old self would definitely have passed it on.
(*I’d claim to be its biggest fan, but that honor must certainly be bestowed on my friend Kyle’s father, who forwards...
February 2011
2 posts
Travel blog.
Looking back necessitates speculation, but I am actually pretty sure Roebling’s friends only feigned courteous interest in this.
(via the BHS catalog)
Helplessness Blues
Oh, thank god. A new album. Well. Track. Finally.
Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues by subpop
(And perhaps this spring will be as lovely as Spring 2008 — that is, when the first F.F. album was released— but the thing is this winter has not been awful, but rather okay — not great, as 10 degrees with wind chill never is — and I think that may preclude for me a...
January 2011
2 posts
“Assad Sawey, a BBC journalist, was beaten by Egyptian police and then went on...”
– NY Observer on treatment of journalists covering Egypt’s ongoing protests (via matthew)
December 2010
6 posts
Two descriptions of my home county, Orange (California), in two national magazines:
“Cuckoo land.” Newsweek, 1964 (“The Double Life of Orange County.”)
“Nut country.” Fortune, 1968. (“Can Anyone Stop Goldwater Now?”)
And! Don’t forget— its conservative populace with a “pathological lust for power … command-like tactics, and...
“Most of us would rather be some dear man’s boob girl than nobody’s...”
– Discovered this choice bit during today’s slog through the archives: Our self-declared spokesperson for the ladies is Harriet Van Horne; in 1968 she was a nationally syndicated columnist whose editorials appeared in The New York Post and other major publications. This is from her (angry)...
November 2010
6 posts
I sing the Body electric;
Two separate strands found in this week’s reading:
“In another e-mail sent to Japan in late summer, Monica [Lewinsky] had divulged that she had given ‘the Creep’ a ‘mushy romance’ novel titled The Notebook before he left for vacation to Martha’s Vineyard. It had been a gesture of sentiment because the president had given her a copy of Leaves of Grass by...
Financial navel-gazing.
For my November rent check I used the last check of my very first checkbook — the book I received when I opened my own independent bank account at the Washington Mutual on the corner of 6th Avenue and W. 4th Street. That means every one of my rent checks written — for all of the apartments in which I have lived over the past four years — bore only one residential address: 75...
This week of suffering.
By now I have told just about everyone — even finally now my mother — about being hit by a car. I should probably speak no more of it and, better yet, should no longer think of it. But it is probably one of those incidents in life that will stick with me for years, if not forever.
For instance:
On Friday afternoon, I worked at the New Museum on the Bowery, sitting at the desk of one...
October 2010
1 post
August 2010
1 post
July 2010
1 post
May 2010
5 posts
Ladies and a bit of Appalachian musical...
“It’s just like the old South, and it’s long past time that we...”
– So says the Arizona superintendent of public instruction, Tom Horne, on a statewide ethnic studies curriculum. The program, with his help and the Governor’s, is now banned. I mean, it’s one thing to claim the narrative of segregation, but to go beyond that and suggest a perceived wrong...
March 2008
2 posts
February 2008
4 posts
“But Obamamania is pretty mild stuff compared to our rhetorical history. When...”
– Words Aren’t Cheap. [Real Clear Politics]
2 tags
Vashti Bunyan “Train Song.” May 1966.
“For the Fitzpatricks, ‘the Village’ was the Henry James scene they...”
– The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick: October 16, 1967. The New York Times.
