I took the leap. I gave notice at my day job. It’s pretty terrifying. I have a few things in the pipeline, but it’s a big risk. I’ve got another month of steady work, then it’s me and my little freelance shingle, hoping I can make it work. And this is the photo I’ve been looking at every time I get spooked. That’s my friend Dennis, who died last month. Denny was the first person outside of my family who truly saw me. We spent the summer after I graduated from high school leading canoe trips in the Boundary Waters and…
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I have a personal theory about Jane Austen, which is that they should immediately stop teaching her to high school students, and perhaps even college students. Jane Austen can only properly be appreciated when you’re old enough to have really messed something up, when you know that sick-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach feeling that comes from a truly missed opportunity, when you understand that you can, indeed, really mess up your own life. Then Jane Austen’s books open up, and become magnificent. That she’s considered a rom-com writer makes me apoplectic. I’ve never been that obsessed with biographical detail, but I thought this article…
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Craig and I survived the PhD program at the University of Utah together — it was a terrible time for me, a program that wasn’t a good fit, and in general, an experience that taught me that academia wasn’t a good habitat for me. But Craig, Craig was maddening, a provacateur by nature, but he was also one of the truly kind people I met at Utah. His loss, which is chronicled here at the Salt Lake Tribune, is immense. He was an enormous talent, a poet just hitting his stride. There’s a lovely rememberence here by his friend Michael…
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FaceBook is a funny thing — I have deeply mixed feelings about it although I do like being in a sort of everyday casual contact with lots of old friends. On Saturday, when I was in between garden chores, I checked in to see what was happening and my old friend Sean O’Grady had posted Jim Houston’s obituary in the New York Times. I had no idea he’d been ill, and was just shocked that he’s gone. Jim was a tall, gentle man who you could count on to give you a true reading of your work. The very first…
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Last week at work was just insane — hence the dearth of blogging — and I spent most of the weekend in recovery-mode. I was so knackered that I totally bailed on Halloween — went to bed at 8:30 that night. But I did manage to pull together a Day of the Dead altar this year. I was in Chicago for the anniversary of Patrick’s death, and it’s been one of those years. My friend Jim lost his beloved Mari (and Isabella lost her mother), David Foster Wallace’s suicide hit me hard, there were two deaths on my dog walking…
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It’s been a weird week — starting with the outpouring of false sentiment over the 9/11 anniversary. I’ve come to dread it, that upwelling of sentiment, the appropriation of tragedy by those only tangenitally affected, the politicians and blowhards pontificating about how we are all changed forever. I’m not talking about the real grief of those who lost loved ones, I’m talking about the obscene way that the day has been spun and abused and turned into a sentimental touchstone. I hate it. Luckily I don’t watch much television, so I missed most of the worst of it. September 13…
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Patrick would be 42 today — it’s always a bittersweet day, to say the least. But even though he’s no longer with us, I like to celebrate his memory on his birthday. Like the Day of the Dead when we decorate graves with flowers and take our dead relatives their favorite foods and drinks as a way of reminding them, and ourselves, that although we’ve been separated, we never really do lose on another. So tonight we’re all having dinner tonight at our friend Jim’s restaurant. We had Patrick’s last birthday there — it was a fun and festive evening…
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You’ve probably seen by now that Madeleine L’Engle has died. Despite having been the kind of kid who could walk between classes with my nose in a book and never bump into anyone (I also became very quick at taking tests because we were free to read after we were done), I was never a big fan of A Wrinkle in Time. As a kid, I had a horror of stories where things turned into other things — Alice in Wonderland, for example. Perhaps it’s because I had the kind of life where 180s were all too common, where people…
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All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of…
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Jean Baudrillard has died in Paris at age 79. I went off to the University of Utah with a running start on Place Last Seen, a novel in which I wanted to explore, among other things, what happens when we come up against the undeniable reality of the physical world. What I encountered there was a department enamored of the (genuinely interesting) ideas of Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida et al, ideas which in Baudrillard’s case included the argument that reality has disappeared altogether, leaving us with only simulation and hyperreality. While I never did buy into the essentialist cast of these…