“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 […]
Read More Fetishes: Annotated Bibliography“‘Don’t go, Peter,’ [Wendy] entreated, ‘I know lots of stories.’ Those were her precise words, so there can be no denying that it was she who first tempted him.” — Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie They have everything in Neverland: hideouts, pirates, mermaids, caves, treehouses, wild animals, natives. Everything except stories. Neverland is only in the […]
Read More Things Other People Said: Long Ago or Far AwayThere is a difference between kissing and talking about kissing. There is a difference between dating and marriage (apparently). And there is a difference between reading and memorizing, which is actually what I’m considering here. I took my students to a writing workshop last week, and one presenter explained the importance of memorizing poems. That […]
Read More Eating Your WordsIf Americans have so little sense of nuances, it isn’t that they’re incapable of grasping them– after all, American reality itself is sufficiently nuanced– but that they would be troubled by them. To accept nuance is to accept ambiguity of judgment, argument, and hesitation; such complex situations force you to think. They want to lead […]
Read More Annotated Bibliography: French slop, Italian despair, and So Ends the Play.
Going On 