Dickensian

“Marley was dead, to begin with.” The day I visited Dickens’ house, it snowed. I couldn’t have asked for more. It was a sparse snow, I was wearing wool and freezing my ass off, and I had pleasant company, cheerfully tolerating my quest. Finally, I got to open the banker-green door, which Mr. Dickens himself […]

Household Words: Part 4

We had a few more meals together: an Indian dinner, with cloth napkins and red sauces, and pizza at a corner table. Then I got my financial aid statement from USC-San Diego. It was more than I’d gotten anywhere else—much more. The building I lived in then had a row of brass mailboxes that must […]

Virgin Birth

I don’t know what possessed me to watch the documentary “The Business of Being Born.” Several women give birth at home in this movie, and you see every detail of how it happens. I wondered– very theoretically since I currently am in no danger of giving birth– whether labor is more like getting a root […]

Fetishes: Annotated Bibliography

“The French have a horror of the smell of cooking food, whereas Americans find it appetizing; in the nineteenth century the first French Rothschild went so far in this aversion as to have the food brought from the kitchen to the dining room on an odourless, because underground, train.” –Edmund White, The Flaneur (I couldn’t […]