A Frolic of My Own

2004-04-12T21:25:00.000-04:00

A Frolic of My Own has moved! Blogger has been good to me, but it's time to leave the nest. Please update your bookmarks and follow me to the new domain:

www.afrolicofmyown.com

It's faster and just all around better at the new place.

Note (1/3/05):I used to be at www.frolicofmyown.com, but a sleazy domain mining site stole that location from me.

2004-04-11T22:33:00.000-04:00

Over the last seven years, I've made the drive between Washington and Charlottesville on Rt. 29 more than fifty times. Friday, though, as I left D.C. for Easter weekend, I felt that I had made a wrong turn. Nothing looked familiar. The highway never had that grade before. The landmarks were missing. New houses, which looked like they'd been standing for several decades, had been built along the road in the last two weeks. Then I realized that I had never before joined the holiday traffic leaving Washington, and it was my first time to drive down Rt. 29 at five miles an hour.

2004-04-11T18:58:00.000-04:00

I've been working on the backend of the blog, and I just wanted to post a test to see if everything is still working.

2004-04-08T18:20:00.000-04:00

America defeated the fasicists in the second World War and brought back their aesthetic as a trophy.

2004-04-08T18:06:00.000-04:00

Either it's hard to report the news these days with a straight face, or snark has invaded the CNN newsroom:

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice told the 9/11 commission today that an August 6, 2001, intelligence memo to President Bush suggested Osama bin Laden was determined to attack inside the United States. Still, Rice said she believed the memo, called "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States," focused on history and "was not a warning."

2004-04-08T07:16:00.000-04:00

Do you think NPR is being a little too impartial when they refer to John Kerry as "the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee?"

2004-04-07T20:40:00.000-04:00

Happy birthday Frolic of My Own! One year ago today I wrote my first post. If I'd known what I was getting myself into, I might have never started blogging. Then again, this year has been full of surprises on all fronts. I failed twice to find a job, earned a Ph.D., became a receptionist, and turned thirty. Next year should bring even more upheaval, with a move slated for June and a third round of trying to find a career.

Changes will be happening on Frolic as well. Once I get the template converted to a new blogging engine, Frolic will occupy it's own domain. The new site will feature fast load times, reliable comments, and a working RSS feed. With any luck, it should be up this weekend.

2004-04-06T22:18:00.000-04:00

untitledSubscribes to Reason magazine will find on the cover of June's issue a satellite image of their own home. According to the New York Times, 40,000 unique copies of the magazine will be printed "to demonstrate the power and importance of databases." Frighteningly, Reason has also managed to imprint every copy of the magazine with the exact name and address of each subscriber.

2004-04-06T21:48:00.000-04:00

untitledWe know that passive verbs make weak sentences, but when fingers hit the keyboard we often forget to put that knowledge into practice. As a gentle reminder, Paul Ford of Ftrain offers the Passivator, a little bookmark that highlights on any website both forms of to be and adverbs. I'm little embarrassed that the Passivator lights up Frolic like a Christmas tree.

2004-04-05T21:23:00.000-04:00

After the White House received a photo of William D. Leahy, the chief of staff for both Roosevelt and Truman, testifying before a 1945 congressional committee on Pearl Harbor, they finally accepted that historical precedent exists for presidential advisors to testify before Congress and allowed Condoleeza Rice to testify in public about 9/11. This raises the more troubling issue, though, of whether anyone in the White House can read?

2004-04-04T22:36:00.000-04:00

untitledIt's been blustery in Washington, so Andrea and I decided to see the cherry blossoms today before all the petals blew away. I knew that the trees line the Tidal Basin, but until the tufts of white and pink appeared scattered throughout the Mall I didn't realize how prevalent the cherry trees are around the monuments.

Tourists had taken all the parking spots, so we could only see the blossoms as we crawled through the traffic on Independence Avenue. Instead of admiring the cherry trees up close, we called some friends who live on Capitol Hill and invited them out for a pitcher of margaritas.

2004-04-01T23:24:00.000-05:00

untitledI hate April Fool's day. Ignoring the hoaxes littering the web feels like deleting spam from my inbox. Inside jokes make public appearances. I'm sure geeks across the globe were spat latté on their laptops when they read that Google would be offering a free gig of email storage (or maybe that is true). People with no sense of humor feel compelled to crack jokes. John Kerry, for example, emailed me one about outsourcing. He was kind enough to warn me in the subject line, so I could delete it immediately.

2004-03-31T23:37:00.000-05:00

Should the Whitney Biennial become a traveling show? In the Wall Street Journal Tyler Green proposes that the Whitney pack up its twice yearly selection of the best American art and head off to the hinterlands with curators and actual artists in tow. Mount a exhibition in Phoenix. Send a mixed media artist into an elementary school in Oklahoma. Add a few local artists to the show in Omaha.

For a museum like the Whitney, focused broadly on American art, it would seem a natural project. The details might be difficult to work out. Who would pay for the show? Our country's national arts endowment barely survives, and its leader boldest initiative plans to introduce Americans to a little known English writer named Shakespeare. How would you entice the artists to travel beyond the cities? Many of them might have fled these very places and relocated years ago to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Would anyone show up to see the art?

Judging from the Wall Street Journal's readers' responses to Tyler's modest proposal, the rest of America would just as soon confine contemporary culture to the largest cities. David Lincoln believes that Norman Rockwell is the only artist the rest of America needs. Hal Goldman offers New York a bargain--the city can keep its "offensive culture" and the hinterlands won't make Manhattanites "listen to country music or eat Jell-O with marshmallows in it." That's what they do for fun in the fly-over states? I've been living on the east coast for far too long.

Tyler received more encouraging words from his own readers at Modern Art Notes, but the Journal's readers paint a depressing picture of the cultural war's aftermath. The right won that battle, of course. Conservatives, by parading across the nation's television screens a few artists they knew would upset large portions of the public, managed to convince too many people that contemporary art's primary medium is offense. The problem was not that a few contemporary artists were denied public funds. The problem is that the right created an atmosphere were an artist's attempt to engage with contemporary life are greeted with suspicion. It is not specific artists that were attacked, but an entire way of confronting and understanding our lives.

On a positive note, it's heartening to see a blogger break into a mainstream publication.

2004-03-30T20:52:00.000-05:00

Libby Copeland, writing in the Washington Post, studies the mating habits of ambitious Washingtonians and discovers that, when trying to get laid, they are as likely to use an Excel spreadsheet as a clever pick-up line. Crashing Friendswaps' annual party, an overly organized attempt to get lonely young people out of their offices, Copeland finds a diversity of backgrounds, since "some of the singles here got their law degrees at Harvard, while others got them at the University of Virginia, and still others at George Washington University."

Last week, I was talking to a current resident of New Orleans who used to live in Washington. When in D.C., he often found himself at parties full of World Bank workers. It was great, he said, to be around folks from every corner of the globe. After a while, though, he began to wonder if countries selected only their most boring citizens for jobs in Washington.

2004-03-29T20:41:00.000-05:00

Other People's Prose:

As my mother and I left Paris on the gloriously sunny morning of June 10, 1940, four days before the Germans took the city, we became part of a panic-stricken caravan whose surreal mayhem still haunts me. The road to Tours, the destination of most Parisians (and also of the French government, which decamped for Tours that very day), was clogged with every possible invention that could move on wheels. Amid a cacophonous din of bleating horns, fire trucks, ambulances, ice cream vendors' vehicles, funeral carriages, municipal street-sweeping trucks, tourist buses racily labeled "Paris La Nuit," even wheelbarrows and prams mingled with the chic limousines, sports cars, and family sedans that were heading south toward the Loire, where, so deluded gossip had it, French troops might still "reconstitute a front."

The opening of Francine du Plessix Gray's essay "The Debacle."

2004-03-28T20:24:00.000-05:00

Reading Junichiro Tanizaki's Diary of a Mad Old Man, a story of an impotent old man's desire for his daughter-in-law, I had a sense that the flat prose fails to express a greater subtly in the original. Since I can't even guess at the Japanese's grammatical structure, I assume that Tanizaki's language must be more complex. I'm more likely to be satisfied, it seems, with a translation from a language closer to English, even if I know nothing of the original text.

It's a mantra that translations always fail the original, and I'm willing to accept this with poetry. On the other hand, having read plenty of fiction and non-fiction in several Romance languages, and occasionally consulted an English translation out of curiosity, I'm not so sure that a good prose translation doesn't often capture the original.

There are great stylists who always look like awkward tourists outside of their own linguistic realm. Cervantes, for example, writes with a deceptive grace that translators often match with overworked and florid language. Most prose writers, though, at best produce uncluttered language, perhaps enlivened with an occasional metaphor. A careful translator can reproduce such works with reasonable fidelity.

2004-03-27T19:32:00.000-05:00

Heart of Canada and Rana both note the number of academic bloggers abandoning the academy over the last few weeks. I suppose it's that time of year, when the last hopes for landing a permanent job have passed and the paychecks for Spring semester teaching are about to dry up. Rana wonders, though, if a link exists between blogging and turning your back on the academy?

My own blog started almost a year ago, at a time when I was finishing my dissertation and deciding to leave the academy. The two events, I think, are not unrelated. Certainly, Frolic gave me the opportunity to vent some frustrations about the difficulty of finding a job when you have too much education and too little experience. At the same time, through blogging I felt connected to a community of intelligent writers, which convinced me that interesting things were happening outside of universities. You could say that blogging encouraged me to leave the academy, and this might be the case with the other bloggers who have recently made the same decision. Would we have sought this community in the blogosphere, though, if we were satisfied with what we found in the academy?

2004-03-27T15:51:00.000-05:00

After reading the Washington Post's review of Lawrense Lessig's Free Culture, I had planned to buy a copy. Lessig's book examines how current copyright laws stifle creativity. Today I found out that he has posted it for free on the internet, proving that Lessig practices what he preaches.

2004-03-24T22:36:00.000-05:00

I visted Balitmore for the first time Saturday, and as I drove through the area around Johns Hopkins "gritty" was the only word that came to mind. Mai, an old college friend, lives there, and a third member of our small undergraduate clique was visiting. Mai lives in a grand old apartment building, which oddly enough has an Indian restaurant in the lobby. I'm sure the curries were good there, but upstairs my friends treated me to lobsters and risotto.

Of the seven or eight people in my circle of college friends, Mai, Stephen, and myself were the only three who didn't end up in law school. Mai studied public health, and has spent most the the last seven years in Vietnam. Stephen went straight into the art history program at Chicago. I spent my years in the academy as well.

It was the first time we'd been together since graduating, and it felt like little had change over the years. Perhaps it was an effect of reconstituting the group dynamic. Perhaps it's because all three of our lives are still unsettled, much like they were when we finished school.

On the way home from Baltimore, I had to detour several blocks off St. Paul, one of the major streets, due to inferno in an office building.

2004-03-24T20:59:00.000-05:00

With their unemployed t-shirt, Old Navy abandons irony and just labels my generation for what it is. Over the weekend, I was talking with an old friend who teaches in a one-year humanities program at the University of Chicago. Many of his students had great jobs until 2000, and now they live with their parents. If you broke down unemployment statistics by age and education, what percentage of the well education people around the age of thirty would be out of work? [link via Wonkette]

2004-03-24T20:30:00.000-05:00

OxyContinOxyContin has gone off patent. I don't know much about the law, but I think this means that now you can legally cook hillbilly heroin in your basement.

2004-03-23T22:40:00.000-05:00

Invisible Adjunct has left the blogosphere. This time, I think it's for good. After failing to secure a tenure track position, she has decided to give up both adjuncting and her blog devoted to that particular form of servitude. Leaving the academy isn't easy, but I think eventually we'll all be better off.

2004-03-22T20:25:00.000-05:00

If you've ever watched cable television after 11:00 p.m., you've seen Matthew Lesko leaping around in a purple suit covered with question marks and telling you how the government wants to give you money. Saturday afternoon, I saw Mr. Lesko driving in Woodley Park. He was wearing the purple suit and his yellow subcompact was covered with black polka dots.

2004-03-18T23:10:00.000-05:00

DupontI was waiting in the Dupont metro tonight, when a woman approached and said, "In America they don't like people from my country. Could you tell me why?" With no idea what country she meant, I answered that I didn't know.

2004-03-17T22:54:00.000-05:00

untitledTyler from Modern Art Notes was kind enough to invite me to join him for drinks with some DC collectors. After a few minutes, it was clear to me that I know far too little about contemporary art. That was no surprise. Having spent years focused on baroque Spain, I feel ignorant about contemporary culture across the board. This blog have been a good way to think about new subjects, and sites like Tyler's are helping me fill the chasms in my knowledge. I also realized, though, that I don't make an effort to visit galleries.

Museums have always been like playgrounds to me. Galleries, however, feel like jewelry stores. I'm afraid to admire something, since the owner might quote me a price and make it clear that I should direct my interests towards more modest objects. If I ever want to know what living artists are up to, I must get over that feeling.

2004-03-17T21:55:00.000-05:00

untitledWashington fundamentally misunderstands mass communications. Billboards and buss shelters are plastered with ads to sway the votes of a few hundred law makers. Commuters crammed in the metro are encouraged to buy multi-million dollar weapons systems. The D.C. tax forms note with a bullet point that you can skip filing in the city if "you were a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and were not domiciled in D.C. during any part of 2003." If you need to make sure nine people know something, wouldn't it be more efficient to contact them directly?

2004-03-16T18:43:00.000-05:00

Freedom HarlemIf the new prime minister in Madrid makes good on his threat to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq, America will be left with no choice but to respond linguistically. Bars will only serve freedom peanuts. Americans will only use freedom fly as an aphrodisiac. And Mayor Bloomberg will rename that New York neighborhood Freedom Harlem.

Our geographically challenged nation might even forgo burritos and enchiladas. Difficult times require sacrifices.

2004-03-15T18:26:00.000-05:00

untitledLast night I wandered around Georgetown with my wife and her friends. I was not only the sole guy in the group, but also the only one who had never enrolled in law school. My time may be coming, though. We started the evening at Georgetown Billiards, located off Wisconsin in a courtyard facing the kitchens of several restaurants. It had a strong undergrad vibe, but it was hard to verify the scene since the place was almost deserted.

Andrea and I insisted on eating, so we moved down to J. Paul's. The restaurant is basically an upscale Applebee's with a raw bar and truly captures the spirit of Georgetown.

I managed to wrangle five vacation days from my boss, and today I cashed one in. Since we've decided to take a cheesy vacation to Puerto Vallarta this June, we've been reading travel guides for the past few today. Today, we both were in the mood for a taco lunch at Mixtec. After lunch, I spent my vacation wandering through the zoo, paying close attention to the coral reef exhibit. I'm hoping to take some scuba lessons while we're in Mexico.

Photo bonus: All this week, Frolic Photo will be featuring photos from the National Museum's coral reef exhibit.

2004-03-15T17:54:00.000-05:00

GadflyThe left needs to get tough, and Gadflyer plans to teach progressives how to fight harder. The on-line magazine debuted today, and it looks like a winner.

2004-03-14T15:34:00.000-05:00

To Do List:

Hear local author and National Book Award winner Edward P. Jones read from his novel The Known World Wednesday evening at the MLK Library.

Study the architectural plans and drawing on loan from MOMA at the National Building Museum's Envisioning Architecture exhibit.

Start an argument with Peter Singer, controversial Princeton philospher, when he reads from The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush Friday at Politics and Prose.

2004-03-13T16:11:00.000-05:00

Zagat'sSpend a few moments reviewing a restaurant for Zagat's, and they'll send you a complimentary copy of their guide. Even if you never eat out, just make something up! Hurry, the Washington, D.C., survey closes Sunday.

2004-03-13T16:02:00.000-05:00

untitledThursday night I had planned to see Douglas Gordon's exhibit at the Hirshhorn, but the security guard explained that only in the summer could they afford to keep the galleries open late. I decided to stick around, though, to hear Eric Fischl, the figurative artist, discuss his work. Who knew that a painter more famous in past decades would draw a standing room only crowd of Washigntonians. It was the hippest gathering of people I'd ever seen in this city.

Fischl, trained by abstract expressionists, soon broke with his teachers and embraced figurative painting. His first figurative painting, of a nude boy standing in a kiddy pool, established his own visual language, and the slides he presented showed little stylist changes or progression from this initial point. Not surprising for a painter who appeared primarily concerned with the content of his work. Often, his painting feel like film stills, alluding to story taking place just beyond the frame.

Fischl described working in a representative mode after abstraction as a "pain in the ass." Representation worked better, he said, when everyone shared a symbolic language. A deck of playing cards or a skull on a table carried the full meaning of the painting. Meaning, it seems, is the burden that the representative painter must bear. But why does he feel the need to create a story? Why must a painting of people be a scene from a narrative?

Fischl's strongest paintings, though perhaps sprung from a story known only to the artist, explore the way a body can move among objects and spaces. He seeks out postures rather poses, he said, and he demonstrates a deep knowledge of not just the way joints can bend but also how flesh in motion can stretch and mound. Much of his work adopts the modernist concern of exploring the implication of a single material, only Fischl has taken the body as his material and mediated it through paint. True to his representational mode, he strives to display his bodies in positions they might realistically hold and spaces where they might actually be found.

2004-03-13T12:27:00.000-05:00

Boomer Deathwatch will be chronicling the final years of John Kerry's generation. They promise to continue posting for at least thirty years, until the last boomer has left the planet. [via Apt. 11D]

2004-03-11T22:52:00.000-05:00

untitledTina Brown, who writes weekly for the Washington Post, often lurches off into an unexpected subject midway through her columns, as if she passed off the writing to an intern or just lost her train of thought in a chemical induced haze. This week, it seems, she was a little tipsy from the start. How else do you explain these opening lines: "The Martha Stewart verdict sent another chill through the chastened world of post-Enron America. United States Code, Section 1001--'Material misrepresentation to the federal government,' the sinister new Zip code of humiliation where Martha now lives--is the first course at upscale dinner parties." Not content to merely mix metaphor, Tina tosses them in a blender and cranks it up to high.

Tina must have realized she was a bit unsteady, so she numbered her seven insights into upper crust society just to make sure they had, at the very least, sequential order. Proving she can count from one to seven, Tina managed not to fall on her face completely this week.

2004-03-11T21:56:00.000-05:00

SpainI first encountered terrorism in Spain, so I probably shouldn't be shocked by the torn up trains and the hundreds of people killed in Madrid this morning. Every time I was in the country, a bomb exploded not too far from where I happened to be. A bank would be targeted. Or a car would explode, killing a random pedestrian instead of the prime minister. Most attacks, until recent years, targeted politicians and police, and you could travel the country with the reasonable assurance that you wouldn't be affected. Being nonchalant about the danger was a way to prove you were cosmopolitan.

The size of today's attack, and the fact that it destroyed places I know well, took me by surprise. My friends in Madrid live and work just outside the city, so I they probably weren't affected. At least not physically. I lived hours from Washington and no where near New York on September 11th, but it changed me in some fundamental ways. For the first time, I felt a deep hatred towards a group of people. I lost my patience with moral relativism. For most Spaniards, terrorism has been a chronic illness in their country since before they were born. I'm sure, though, that something fundamental will change in their attitude to it as well.

Security has always been tight in Spain, and it seemed effective. You read frequent reports about plots that were foiled and cells of terrorist exposed. If the terrorists, and their must have been at least twenty, were able to coordinate this attack in a country like Spain, then what level of security could possible keep us safe?

2004-03-10T22:02:00.000-05:00

Rate my committeeRateMyProfessors.com dishes the goods on my dissertation committee, who range from "well informed" to "boring" to "hot," as indicated by the chili pepper icon next to a faculty member's name. It's hard to shake the feeling that maybe, after a few beers, I might have contributed some of these reviews myself.

2004-03-09T19:26:00.000-05:00

ABC NewsWhile Democrats and Republicans scramble to find an answer to the American People's growing concern over outsourcing, one Boston company shows that free enterprise, and not politicians, might be better suited to solve the nation's economic dilemma. According to ABC News, CMarket founder Jon Carson decided that instead of outsourcing programming in India, he would offer American jobs at Indian wages. Thanks to CMarket's "alternative to outsourcing" a group of formerly unemployed professionals are working again, albeit at half the salary of the average U.S. computer programer.

Wait a minute. Isn't that the danger of outsourcing--that wages will fall to the level of the developing world? Did ABC just describe the problem itself and call it the solution? Are network reporters really that dense? Or, has the job market gotten so bad that a 50% pay cut sounds like a good alternative to unemployment?

2004-03-08T22:02:00.000-05:00

The Only SonFailure, rather than shame, fells the protagonist in most modern tragedies. Disappointment, though, appears less frequently in films or books. Perhaps disappointment, which requires us to empathize with one character's reaction to the failure of another, is too complex for most writers or film makers to produce. In The Only Son,Yasujiro Ozu proves his power as director of the subtle by creating a devastating portrait of a mother's disappointment at her son's miserable life.

In Ozu's 1936 film, a mother sacrifices her material comforts to support her son's studies in Tokyo. When, after years apart, she travels from her rural village to visit him, she finds her son living in a shanty town teaching night school classes. At first they speak through smiles like gritted teeth, but soon she confronts him. She is angry not that he lives poorly, but that he has given up after she has given him everything.

Ozu fills the film with details of rural labor among the silk-spinning industry and urban poverty in a Tokyo where 44% of the college graduates are unemployed. 1930s Japan, though, provides only a backdrop for the family drama. While the son points to other young men struggling in Tokyo, the mother makes clear that she cares about her son and her sacrifices. There are moments of partial reconciliation, but Ozu does not allow for resolution. In the end, the mother must resort to fantasies when, after returning home, her friends ask about her visit to see her only son.

Throughout the month of March, venues throughout Washington, D.C., will be showing a retrospective of Yasujiro Ozu's films.

2004-03-07T20:54:00.000-05:00

JobsOnly a meagre 21,000 jobs were created in the 29 days of February, despite the robust performance of the stock market. According to Calpundit, all 21,000 new employees work for the U.S. government. In this case, I guess George W. Bush really does get all the credit.

Update: It looks like all those jobs were created by state governments. No points for Mr. Bush.

2004-03-07T13:43:00.000-05:00

To Do List:

See Yasujiro Ozu's The Only Son, a 1936 film about a son disappointing his mother, Sunday at the National Gallery of Art (4:30 pm).

Hear Andrew Sean Greer read from The Confessions of Max Tivoli, in which an old man grows young, Thursday at Politics and Prose.

Visit the survey of Douglas Gordon, the Scottish multimedia artist, at the Hirshhorn.

2004-03-07T08:30:00.000-05:00

American PeopleIn this election year, you and I, the American People, will hear politicians presenting seemingly contradictory interpretations of the economy, the war in Iraq, and the importance of military service in Vietnam. How are we, the American People, supposed to know what to think? Luckily, Greg Knauss has built a website that posts every news story that mentions the American People. As an American Person, just read the site on a daily basis and adjust your opinions when they diverge from those of your fellow citizens. People of other countries, of course, are free to believe anything they wish. [Via MetaFilter]

2004-03-06T20:10:00.000-05:00

MetroThe Paris metro, roughly equal in size to the Washington system, appears almost four times as dense in Fake Is Real's comparison of subway systems from around the world.

The site also notes that today, March 6th, the good people of Ghana are celebrating their independence. [Via Mike Daisey]

2004-03-06T18:14:00.000-05:00

Word SpyWord Spy collects neologisms and clever phrases just days after they enter the English language. This ephemera--frienemy, reterosexual, latchkey dog--will fade away in a few months, but Paul McFedries' site provides a record of linguistic curosities no quite worthy of the OED. [via Bookslut]

2004-03-06T13:39:00.000-05:00

UnoA few weeks ago, McDonald's closed up shop in Cleveland Park. This week, Uno's Pizzeria shut down, leaving not a single chain restaurant in a area dense with dining options. Starbucks and Fosters Brother Coffee, however, are still selling overpriced caffeine.

2004-03-03T23:08:00.000-05:00

Janet JacksonIn the days after Janet Jackson forced men, women, and even children to see a fleeting glimpse of her right breast, Americans were too distraught to react calmly. Some called for fines, some a permanent ban on rock and roll, while others would not be satisfied until we invaded a small country or island. Cooler heads prevailed, though, and we realized that greater vigilance and a five second tape delay for live broadcasts would prevent such a disaster in the future.

Now, almost one month later, we have enough emotional distance from that day that we can analyze it rationally. To truly understand the causes and devastating effects of Ms. Jackson flashing our nation, however, the U.S. government and Viacom's MTV must release the archival records historians need to draw clear conclusions about this unprecedented historical moment. The Smoking Gun, the Ralph Nader of the cyber-age, has taken a first step by posting 23 letters of both protest and praise received by the FCC following the Super Bowl. These documents provide an unparalleled glimpse into the collective mentality of American in early February of 2004, a country in some ways much like our present-day American and in other ways far removed from our contemporary lives. Concerned citizen Sharon Jenkins, for example, wrote:

i hope you do investigate the Jackson incident. i am anything but a prude i have owned a strip club and later a adult site but this isnt about 1st admendment rights this is pure lack of respect for american families and decency. Children were watching this and to mix sex/violence like this gives a really wrong message.on a lighter side to flash fake breast adds insult to injury! go getem !..............

Owners of adult sites, much like the owners of many blogs, appear ignorant of the basic rules of punctuation and capitalization. [Thanks Why I Hate D.C.]

2004-03-01T23:20:00.000-05:00

Average JoeIt will be no surprise to awkward guys everywhere that once again the beauty chose the buff in the second season of Average Joe. Larissa selected the well built Gil over Brian, the earnest Bostonian. But the happy couple's bliss lasted no longer than a commercial break. Gil could not face Larissa's terrible secret: she had dated Fabio. Leaving in disgust, Gil said, "Every man watching can understand how I feel."

As Larissa curled up on a couch and agonized over the eternal curse of being Fabio's ex-girlfriend, I realized that this moment was the culmination of years of reality television. After such a strange spectacle, no more stunts or revelations could ever be shocking. No doubt the reality genre will now fade away until nostalgia brings it back in two decades. I am glad to have witnessed this historic achievement.

2004-03-01T22:11:00.000-05:00

DodgeI drove down to Charlottesville this weekend in a Dodge Stratus. Since the rental agency ran out of economy cars, it was either the Stratus or a minivan. The Stratus, I will say, was damn fast. It was also somewhat embarrassing. The Stratus is the muscle car for the man who has yet to indulge in a full blown mid-life crisis.

I'm used to driving silly cars, though. My father buys used cars for fun, and he was always loaning me the oddest vehicles. A gray convertible Mustang with a black racing stripe. A red Capri so small my knees bumped the dashboard. A purple, convertible Le Baron. Given my conditioning, I could have driven the minivan with pride.

With spring finally arriving, I was reminded of how wonderful Charlottesville seemed when I first moved there. Sunday afternoon, Andrea and I parked outside our old house and followed the route through town and grounds that we marked out when we used to walk our dog Parsley. The Greeks must celebrating their formals, since I saw some soiled cummerbunds tossed along the sidewalk.

2004-03-01T21:56:00.000-05:00

LSATI registered for the LSAT today. I don't know if I want to go to law school. With no clear path to a career, though, I need to give myself as many options as possible. I am good at being a student. I perform well on standardized tests. There is a strong possibility that I would be successful in law school.

Sometime in my senior year of high school, I decided that I wanted to be a literature professor. A strange goal for someone who had never been to college. I read books. I liked to write. Although I always got the A's that were expected of me, I had no interest in school until I realized that you could earn your good grades by reading novels.

I attended a rural high school filled with suburban kids. It was a conservative institution. Not conservative in the sense that everyone worshipped the same God and didn't mix too much with other races, although that was the case. As an institution, it was shaped more by the conservative instincts of middle class climbers, who believed that their children's success depended on a deep devotion to blandness. Any deviation or even documentable signs of personality might endanger their admission to a private college. The study of science and math was celebrated. All other subjects were offered because college admission required them.

When I discovered that people outside my town might value someone with an interest in literature, I slavishly attached myself to that subject for the next sixteen years. It seemed like a rebellion at the time. I can see now, though, that being a professor was the most conservative way to pursue that interest. Or so I might have assumed at the time.

Now, at 30 years old with a Ph.D. in hand and no real possibility of being an academic, I'm struggling with the fear and exhilaration of endless possibilities that most people face after graduating from college. I think the law would be interesting, but it also feels like a safe choice. I know how that story ends. Are there more interesting things I could do, if only I were forced to find them? Am I too old for such a search? Am I too timid?

2004-02-27T23:11:00.000-05:00

Blog sylistJohn Holbo, one half of Examined Life, begins his stint as a Crooked Timber guest blogger with a thoughtful meander through his personal history in the blogosphere. His dismay that several of his favorite voices adopted a doctrinaire right wing agenda after 9/11 will probably generate the most discussion. I was struck, though, by his comment that blogs have produced few unique stylists.

Do blogs perhaps impose a uniform style? I often feel my own prose pulled in directions that I would never have anticipated. We all want to be like the popular kids, and when popularity can be measured on daily a basis it's tempting to imitate the sites with the most readers. Personally, I wish I were funny like TMFTML, but if I tried I would no doubt sound more like an obnoxious drunk who corners you at a party.

Given the brevity of the average blog entry, however, we might have no right to expect more than the seeds from which a more developed style might grow. While some writers create a voice that can be recognized in a single sentence, most require a few pages to establish themselves. The first group no doubt excels in the blogosphere, but I would guess that the second is more common since even the shortest prose genre typically runs more than a paragraph. [Thanks Apt 11D for link.]

2004-02-26T22:09:00.000-05:00

Other people's prose Other people's prose:

We are allowed to be deeply into basketball, or Buddhism, or Star Trek, or jazz, but we are not allowed to be deeply sad. Grief is a thing that we are encouraged to "let go of," to "move on from," and we are told specifically how this should be done. Countless well-intentioned friends, distant family members, hospital workers, and strangers I met at parties recited the famous five stages of grief to me: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I was alarmed by how many people knew them, how deeply this single definition of the grieving process had permeated out cultural consciousness. Not only was I supposed to feel these five things, I was meant to feel them in that order and for a prescribed amount of time.

From Cheryl Strayed's essay "The Love of My Life."

2004-02-25T21:29:00.000-05:00

OklahomaAccording to the Mason Dixie Dialect Quiz, I'm 56% southern. That sounds about right, given both my background and my attitude towards the South. I was born and raised in Oklahoma, with one grandfather a patriarch in a small Georgia town and another a coal miner and sharecropper. Once I got a chance, though, I started edging my way towards the sophistication of the Northeast. My accent, like many who grow up in Tulsa, has always been flat, and I found it flattering when people guessed that I hailed from New York.

In college a friend suggested that I would like living in an Eastern city, since I wouldn't have to smile at people on the streets. These days, though, I feel nostalgic for the South. After recent visits to Austin, Athens, and Nashville, I realize that I'm at home in the lower half of America. Partly it's a question of taste. With music and food two of my top obsessions, the South feels like the one part of the U.S. where people pursue those activities with more natural enthusiasm than conscious effort. Partly it's a question of manners. Southerners might be appalled by your behavior, but they are unlikely to be offended. Partly, in my case at least, it's a question of class.

A friend who runs the South Atlantic Humanities Center said that Oklahoma straddles the line between the South and the Midwest. I suggested that income pretty much determines where you fall on that divide. While my social climbing has been more about intellectual prestige than earning power, it's hard for me to distinguish my genuine interests from a desire to separate myself from my origins. Too many people in my family get bogged down in bad decisions and squander their opportunities. As someone determined not to make those mistakes, my early rejection of the South probably resulted more from the desire to distance myself from a social class than a region.

Now I've traveled the globe and accumulated three fancy college degrees. Even though I'm marginally employed, it feels more like slumming than fate. Maybe now that I'm confident with my position, I can embrace what I like about the South without feeling that it represents a surrender. [Quiz via, who else, The Sardonic Subversive.]

2004-02-24T22:19:00.000-05:00

Sour BobSour Bob has returned. Who knew?

2004-02-24T22:18:00.000-05:00

Mardi GrasIn celebration of Mardi Gras, the Episcopal church that I walk past everyday tied colored balloons to the sidewalk sign advertising its services. No doubt tonight all around the capital Washingtonians are engaging in restrained debauchery at fund raising galas.

2004-02-24T19:05:00.000-05:00

OFACThe U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control decided that, while Americans may publish works written in embargoed countries, we must not edit these texts. Editing, you see, is a service, and we can't provide services to the evil nations of Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Cuba.

I was going to add a snarky comment, but that seems superfluous. [via TMFTML]

2004-02-23T21:44:00.000-05:00

picturesI sure post a lot of pictures of ugly people (I don't include Calderón de la Barca in this group).

2004-02-23T21:39:00.000-05:00

Naomi Wolf The news has been been circulating all week, but today New York finally published the tawdry tale of Harold Bloom's alleged assault on Naomi Wolf. To anyone who has spent a few years in graduate school, the details ring true. In an age of hyper-specialized intellectual pursuits, at academic conferences stories of faculty misconduct provide the lengua franca for cocktail hour conversations. It's not clear if the superstar professors engage in more bad behavior, or if their stories are just more interesting to tell. They are, I'm sure, more likely to be protected by the administration.

I have no doubt that Bloom and Yale behaved badly, but if Wolf got the details right they also acted quite oddly. Harold Bloom, if your going to be a cad, at least be a decent guest and leave behind the bottle of sherry you brought. And Yale, if you're concerned that an alumnae will sue, constantly hounding her to fundraise on your behalf might not be the best way to dampen a desire to get even.

2004-02-22T23:39:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post pans La dama duende, the Gala Theater's production of the comedy by the seventeenth-century playwright Calderón de la Barca, more for the play than the production. Tricia Olsewski focuses her praise on the physical comedy of the actors, the staging, and song and dance routines inserted by the director. She finds Calderón's work, however, "dense" and "complex."

If you have never seen light comedy from the classical age of Spanish drama, think Moliere but messy, think of a Shakespearean comedy with less psychology and more intrigue. Identity is always unclear. While some characters find happy endings, other must make the best of their lot. I would call the plays intricate, rather than complex.

Olsewski, attempting to give a perspective audience member fair warning of the play's difficulty, spends the first third of her review detailing the plot twists of Act I. But writing out the plot of seventeenth-century Spanish comedy is like writing out every twists, turn, and collision of an action film's car chase and then declaring that it's impossible to follow. When the plays work, they surge forward at a breathless pace and delight with twists of plots rather than exploration of characters. Olsewski, trained in a long tradition of literature that focuses on the individual, expected complexity from the characters and found it in the plot.

2004-02-18T22:06:00.000-05:00

untitledAdam named the animals with care, but modern real estate developers focus more on expediency and marketing when naming their streets:

When it comes to naming subdivision streets, there are no taste tribunals or standards committees. "No, it's usually some little minion like me in the background doing it," said Bonnie Sharkey, vice president of sales and marketing in the South Bay division of Standard Pacific Homes, one of the largest residential developers in the West. Her street-naming process is more prosaic than poetic. "You get out a Thomas Brothers map and start looking at what street names are already in use," she said. Her creative muse often is found in a dictionary or online. "Sometimes I use paint swatches. They have beautiful names." Then there's the theory that builders name streets or entire subdivisions after the little furry critters that their bulldozer just displaced. "It's probably true," Sharkey said. "I remember naming a project in Galt, "Quail Hollow," because when I walked the bare site there was a quail with her three little babies." Does the quail still live there? "Well, it was there for a while."

[again from Sardonic Subversive, where does he find this shit?]

2004-02-18T21:07:00.000-05:00

untitledAfter suffering for far too long, the good folks of the Missouri Ozarks can finally shed pounds by having their stomachs reduced to "the size of an egg." According to the News Leader, in May CoxHealth will perform its first bariatric surgery, the same procedure that transformed NBC weatherman Al Roker from a jolly fat man into an oddly unsettling thin guy.

The newspaper warns that this miracle cure is far from painless, since after the operation patients "must cut out concentrated sweets and salts, and foods high in fat and refined carbohydrates. No milkshakes. No 64-ounce Big Gulps. No Krispy Kremes. No Doritos. No carbonated beverages and no alcohol. For life. " Coming soon to the Ozarks--healthy diets and exercise. [via The Sardonic Subversive]

2004-02-17T22:02:00.000-05:00

Other people's proseOther people's prose:

Duke was the cook at my fly camp when I was out in the delta researching a piece about "bush housekeeping," and he thickened his sauces there by grating roots he called desert potatoes into boiling fat. But the secret was how many potatoes and, indeed, how to distinguish those potatoes from all the other roots that looked like potatoes but were something you'd rather not ingest. I never found out, because the day we'd planned to fly to the desert to dig some up a tourist camping on a nearby game preserve was eaten by a lion, and my pilot volunteered to collect the bones. Food like that is, as they say in the art world, site-specific.

Jane Kramer in her essay "The Reporter's Kitchen."

2004-02-16T23:04:00.000-05:00

San FranciscoI spent last weekend above San Francisco's Mission District in Bernal Heights discussing the investments of the Telluride Association and enjoying the perfect view of downtown San Francisco. A local political consultant had loaned us his home office, which occupies the first floor of a building that once held a neighborhood grocery. As he and his family took refuge upstairs, his five year old daughter asked what all those people were doing below. He explained the basics of stocks and investing. She only had one question: "Daddy, does it really take all day?"

Yes, it took all day and most of the next morning. Although we were trapped at the top of the hill, a few people made an escape Saturday and returned with burritos from the outside world. I've been enjoying the burritos served up by McDonald's Chipotle chain, but after tasting the original I understand completely why someone from California would be unimpressed by the imitation.

I've been to San Francisco once before, but I was so young that I only remember the newspapers headlining the box office take of Raiders of Lost Ark and my great aunt refusing to enter the prison cell on the Alcatraz tour. She was a high stakes gambler, and she didn't like the odds that an earthquake might hit while we were inside the cell.

This time, I was old enough to appreciate the sophisticated cuisine at Foreign Cinema and drink beers at Doc's Clock. I took the red-eye back Sunday, which gave me about eight hours to see what I could after our meeting. Since time was limited, I decided to focus on SFMOMA, although I spent almost an hour wandering lost through the Yerba Buena complex of merry-go-rounds, playgrounds, and fountains before I found the museum.

While standing in line to check my coat at SFMOMA, I bumped into an old student of mine from the University of Virginia. Not such an unusual event, since I taught almost 650 UVa undergrad during my six years in graduate school. She was in town visiting some friends and invited me to join them for dinner at the Globe.

The SFMOMA had a lot to offer, and some floors were better than others. Later this week I'll try to gather my thoughts about the permanent collect, the Diane Arbus exhibit, and the overview of 90s art.

San Francisco feels like Europe, but with a stronger Hispanic influence. I've never seen such a collection of old and odd signs. Where else would they advertise "Donuts and Chinese Food." I don't know if, like Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles, the two items are served on the same plate. I hope to go back and acually spend time there. It seems like one of those cities--New York, Paris--where I would love to live if I had any money.

Photo bonus: All this week Frolic Photo will features my snap shots from San Francisco.

2004-02-15T15:05:00.000-05:00

SpringThe days are longer and for the first time in months I can open a window in my apartment. Once again, I'm wondering why I don't live in the South, where you can keep the windows open damn near all year round.

2004-02-14T16:00:00.000-05:00

Amazon Ever wonder who really writes those anonymous reviews on Amazon? After a software glitch revealed the reviewers' true identities, we learned that the nom de plume "A reader in St. Louis, MO" belongs to Dave Eggers. [via Invisible Adjunct]

2004-02-14T15:50:00.000-05:00

Names Over the last decade, American parents have become increasingly less inclined to name their sons Todd, my own given name. At the start of the 1990s the name ranked 169th in popularity, according to the Social Security Administration. By 2002, 475 names were more popular.

I've never been that fond of Todd. I realize, when I hear the unfortunate names given to many of my cousins, that it could have been worse. That the single vowel in Todd universally baffles speakers of Romance languages, though, continues to cause me grief. My parents, of course, can be excused for not foreseeing this problem.

Beyond the inherit unattractiveness of Todd, sitcoms can probably be blamed for the name's fall in popularity. On the Simpsons, Scrubs, and other shows, the annoying character is always named Todd. [thanks Crooked Timber]

2004-02-12T22:56:00.000-05:00

I'll be back The weekend approaches, and for me it will last three whole days. For the first time this year, I'll be collecting a paycheck for doing nothing. With all that extra time, I plan to update everyone on my recent trip to San Francisco.

2004-02-09T20:39:00.000-05:00

To do listTo do list:

Sleep.

Sleep.

Sleep some more.

2004-02-09T20:38:00.000-05:00

I need sleepI took the red-eye in from San Francisco, and it's taken a serious toll on me physically. When I booked the ticket, I didn't think much about the time difference. Boarding a plane in California at 11:00 p.m. and arriving in Washington at 8:30 a.m. sounded easy, since I could get a full night's sleep on the way. Of course, had I done the math I would have realized that it was only a five hour flight.

This morning, I went straight from the airport to the office, showered in the building's gym, and was clocked in and working by 10:00 a.m. The first few cups of coffee helped, but I still ached well into the afternoon.

I would say that my body's reaction to sleep deprivation shows my age, but I've never had much stamina for such ill considered ventures. New York, with its 4:00 a.m. last call, always tested my resolve to shut down the bar. And I was never the last one to leave a party, unless I passed out on the couch.

After I've slept, I'll have more to say about my brief trip to San Francisco.

2004-02-07T11:27:00.000-05:00

Pittsburgh Airport I landed in the Pittsburgh airport an hour ago and ran to my gate, only to find that my 20 minute layover had grown to an hour. Plenty of time to have a drink, at least. Sam's Brewhouse, the airport outlet of the Samuel Adams brewery, was full, so I found a table in the New Orleans themed Fat Tuesday. True to its inspiration, Fat Tuesday felt a little dirtier than the other airport bars and the patrons looked a little sleazier. I passed on the frozen Hurricanes and Mud Slides, and settled for a bourbon on the rocks.

For the me, spending time in airports is the best part of traveling. While America may be an increasingly homogenized nations, with every citizen shopping at Wal-Mart and drinking no foam skim lattés from Starbucks, enough regional variation exists that each airport gate displays its own culture. At the moment, I'm waiting at a gate for San Francisco, where everyone around me has a cutting edge mobile device. When I go home to Oklahoma, outside the gate I always encounter women with brightly colored sweatshirts decorated with seasonal themes.

Note: Just minutes before I boarded my flight to San Francisco, I discovered a weak WiFi signal. Unfortunately, I lost the connection just as they called my row, so I had to post this later.

2004-02-05T21:17:00.000-05:00

Custodians meeting Every few months I jet off to an exotic location, where financial professionals treat me like I'm rich. Let me tell you, it breaks up the tedium of the work week. It's unusual, and often feels a little absurd, that eight young people with no financial experience and, by and large, not enough personal funds to own a 401K share responsibility for a $40 million endowment, but that's how our founder wanted it. When L.L. Nunn started the Telluride Association nearly 100 years ago, he directed it to run educational programs and decided that the students themselves would be in charge.

When I have more time, I'll explain how the Telluride Association provides the missing link between the neo-conservative movement, William T. Vollmann, and Jennifer 8. Lee. For the moment, though, I've got to plow through some stock reports and pack my suitcase.

2004-02-04T19:48:00.000-05:00

Jennifer 8. Lee Jennifer 8. Lee, the New York Times' oddly named Washington correspondent, has found herself attacked by the left and the far right after the New York Sun declared her the "D.C. Hostess with the Mostest." One of her Harvard classmates, in turns out, strung together quotes about Ms. Lee by their fellow Cambridge pals and published the puff in the New York Sun. As Wonkette says, "Do you have any idea how hard it is to find people who didn't go to Harvard? You might have to actually call a, like, stranger or something. Ew."

If Jennifer 8. keeps getting abuse from all sides about her social life, she just might become Washington's answer to Paris Hilton. Who said we didn't have glamor in this city?

2004-02-04T19:15:00.000-05:00

Oklahoma map XTCIAN wonders, "What makes Oklahoma so desperate to touch New Mexico?"

2004-02-03T22:54:00.000-05:00

Lunch Carts Rural Pennsylvania may use a rodent to predict the weather, but I take my cues from the local lunch cart. On the second day of February, after a long absence during the coldest period of the year, Amy returned with her cart full of fifty-cent sodas and off-brand cookies to the sidewalk in front of my office. She had to huddle for warmth over the hot dog steamers, but she looked happy to be back.

Today, though, Amy and her cart were again hibernating. This means that Washington, unfortunately, must endure another six weeks of winter.

2004-02-03T19:03:00.000-05:00

Titian and Janet JacksonIn the midst of all the commotion over Janet Jackson's breast, Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes offers some historical perspective. If you've never seen a naked body in public, then you've never been to an art museum.

2004-02-02T22:37:00.000-05:00

To do listTo do list:

Catch Flamenco singer José Mercé at the Flamenco Festival.

See Jacques Henri Lartigue's photos of ladies and cars at the Sandra Berler Gallery.

Hear Liam Callanan read from The Cloud Atlas, a novel about deadly balloons, Wednesday at Barnes and Noble (6 p.m. at 555 12th St.).

2004-02-02T20:23:00.000-05:00

Simpsons How many Simpsons viewers got this joke?

[Marge, Bart, and Lisa go to their local "Bookaccino" superbookstore.] LISA: I'm going up to the fourth floor, where the books are! BART: I'm going to taunt the Ph.D.s! [Bart approaches the three workers at the espresso bar, all of whom wear glasses and bored expressions.] BART: Hey guys! I heard a new assistant professorship just opened up! [Ph.D'd baristas gasp and lean forward eagerly.] BART: Yes, that's right. At the University of ... PSYCH!

As Chris said on Household Opera's comments, "As we watched it, my friend and I laughed, and then ... we didn't." I go to Ben's Chili Bowl instead of watching TV, and I miss the Ph.D. gag and the voice of Thomas Pynchon.

2004-02-01T20:52:00.000-05:00

Lost in TranslationLost in Translation captures the boredom and exhilaration of living abroad. In the morning, you visit an ancient temple. In the afternoon, you drink in the hotel bar because you can't imagine another way to pass the hours until dinner. The natives have their routines, and their families, and their jobs, and you realize that, even in Tokyo, it's impossible to fill your day when you live outside the fabric of a city's real life.

When I spent a summer in Madrid, Sundays were impossible. The Spaniards had Masses to attend and family to dine with and talk to all afternoon, but foreigners wandered the city trying to find a café that would allow then to linger for a few hours.

In Sofia Coppola's film, the mismatched pair of John Harris and Charlotte makes sense not just because they are both uneasy in their own marriages, but also because strange alliances are formed when you find yourself in a society in which you play no part.

2004-01-31T17:08:00.000-05:00

Other people's proseOther people's prose:

Now you have reached a point in your life when you realize that you were not meant for youth, that you were in fact always a little older than everyone else and merely waiting for your age to catch up to you, so that you might live partly through memory, as you were meant to.

From Rachel Cohen's "Lost Cities," collected in the Best American Essays (2003).

2004-01-29T19:41:00.000-05:00

Lunch and National GeographicInstead of eating lunch today, I ran to a lab between Dupont Circle and Foggy Bottom to pee in a cup. I may still be a temp, but now that a major corporation wants to examine my bodily fluids I feel that I've taken another important step into the working world.

As I rushed back to work, trying not to stain my tie with the juice dripping from a lamb pita I picked up at House of Kebab, I happened upon the National Geographic headquarters, which fills a full city block and rises several stories. I always assumed they shot the magazines on location, but I guess all the photos must be done on sets. I can't imagine what else they would be doing with all that space.

2004-01-28T22:01:00.000-05:00

Good newLooks like I've scored a nice little raise and the option to enroll in health insurance I can actually afford. I'm still a temp, but I'm going to be an in-house temp. Once this goes through, I'll be able to live without the generosity of my parents. Being independent feels good.

2004-01-28T19:37:00.000-05:00

Iraq stock marketThree years ago, Jay Hallen was touring Cuba with the Yale Glee Club and arguing that the Indigo Girls suck. The Bush administration recognized his keen judgment, moved him to the Bagdad palace, and charged him with rebuilding the Iraqi stock market. Sure, he has no previous experience or interest in finance, but he's been cramming real hard for the last few months. According to the Wall Street Journal [not online], Jay managed to allay the suspicions of some Iraqi businessmen with his "confident tone and his repeated promises to quickly open a stock market that is the envy of the Arab world." Overconfidence alone has served the Bush administration well in Iraq, so we have no doubt that Jay will be the next Dick Grasso.

2004-01-27T22:35:00.000-05:00

It's KerryThe tiny eastern state has spoken, and they decided that at this moment in history a phlegmatic New England patrician is the right man to lead the nation. If Kerry actually wins this nomination, I'm afraid the debates will be a rerun of 2000, when I felt like a teenager constantly afraid that his parents would embarrass him in public.

I spent the last few months trying to figure out Howard Dean, and now I got blind sided by Kerry. Perhaps I'll just ignore the whole thing until after Super Tuesday, and then examine my choices.

2004-01-27T22:21:00.000-05:00

Snow and IceI'm cold even with the heater cranked up high and its too danger to walk down the block for a beer. Wonkette reminds us that "it's just a little ice on the road, people. You know, what you put in your drinks." Easy to say when you're a professional blogger who never has to leave the house, but tomorrow morning I have to skate down the sidewalk to the metro.

Over the weekend, Andrea and I saw a French woman wearing nothing warmer than a jean jacket happily walking through the cold and chatting on her cell phone. Europeans, Andrea noted, seem immune to discomfort. From a young age they become accustomed to thin mattresses, stiff chairs, and drafty rooms. As an America, though, I will proudly exercise my birthright to wear a pained look on my face when it's so cold my ears hurt.

2004-01-27T19:13:00.000-05:00

Other people's prose Other people's prose:

I'd be willing to shave years from the end of my life to go back and intercept that evening under a cantilever when we both put our coats over our heads and rushed through the rain after coffee and I said, almost without thinking, I didn't want to say goodnight yet, although it was already dawn. I would give years, not to unwrite this evening or to rewrite it, but to put it on hold and, as happens when we bracket off time, be able to wonder indefinitely who I'd be had things taken another turn. Time, as always, is given in the wrong tense.

From André Aciam's "Lavender," collected in The Best American Essays.

2004-01-25T22:52:00.000-05:00

Blogroll updateThe blogosphere giveth and the blogosphere taketh away. Invisible Adjunct, one of the few bloggers I read every day, has taken an extended break. I'm not sure what I'll do without a daily entry on the ill state of the academic job market, but I suspect it will be good for my mental health. I'm leaving IA in the blogroll, since the comment section has become even more active since the host stop posting. It just shows that academics will do anything to avoid grading papers.

The Antic Muse has returned in the guise of Wonkette, a snide guide to Washington. Wonkette is latest franchise of Gawker Media, the Starbucks of the internet. Wonkette went online Friday, and she demonstrated enough piss and vinegar her first day out to prove that she has more testosterone than Howard Dean.

In other good news, Dublog is again posting pretty pictures everyday.

2004-01-25T10:27:00.000-05:00

To Do ListTo Do List:

Dance with the dragon this afternoon at the Chinese New Year parade (2:00 p.m. at 6th and H).
See Jeanne Moreau introduce Bay of Angels Tuesday at the AFI.
Hear My Morning Jacket playing something like country music and something like rock Saturday at the 9:30 Club.

2004-01-22T23:26:00.000-05:00

Paul WolfowitzPaul Wolfowitz orders a lot of take out in Cleveland Park. Just after Christmas I was walking down Connecticut Avenue with my parents, who were visiting from Oklahoma. A large SUV with police lights embedded under the hood was parked outside the Park and Shop. First a young woman stepped out and scanned the area. Then, a man with a shaved head in a dark suit exited the car, signaled to the passenger it was safe, and the two agents led Paul Wolfowitz into Sala Thai. The undersecretary of defense got back in the car a little later with a bag of food.

I assumed my parents would be impressed by spotting a powerful Washington figure, but neither my mom nor my dad had ever heard of Wolfowitz.

Last week, I was waiting in line for a table at Nam-Viet Pho 79. Wolfowitz shoved past to order some food at the bar, and his agent stood next to me nervously eyeing his charge at the other end of the restaurant. Wolfowitz left with enough food for a crowd, so maybe he was having the entire neo-conservative cabal over to his house for spring rolls and pho.

2004-01-21T23:24:00.000-05:00

Tearing bookChristoper Howse tears apart books and feels no shame, or so he claims. In his confession in the Telegraph, he must assure us that he only mutilates widely distributed titles and extol the convenience of the practice.

The person who first introduced me to Thomas Pynchon tore apart his copy of Gravity's Rainbow for similar reasons. He read the book cover to cover, promptly dropped out of graduate school, and moved to Alaska. After seperating the book into individual sections, he headed off to a tent to reread Pynchon's masterpiece. Periodically, he would return to Anchorage for provisions and the next section of the novel.

Terry Belanger, who runs the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, liked to destroy a book at the end of his class on bibliography and print. During the lecture, he would fiddle with a book and, as he concluded, draw the class's attention to it. Some 18th or 19th century edition, old but not rare. And then he ripped the pages from the spine, tore the cover in two, and turned the pages into scrap. The first time I saw the stunt, I was as shocked as the room full of rare book librarians around me. The second time, I knew it was coming and could enjoy the stunned faces around me. He did this to illustrate a point, but I remember only the illustration and not the lesson. [via Maud Newton]

2004-01-19T22:01:00.000-05:00

Ben's Chili bowlBen's Chili Bowl has been clogging arteries since 1958, when the soul tunes on Ben Ali's jukebox were just hitting the charts. That Chili Half-Smoke with cheese fries may have taken a year off my life, but I'll tell you it was worth it.

From the outside, Ben's looks as glamorous as a movie theater. Inside, customers clog the entryway in a snaking line as they wait to order. As you inch towards the register, it's hard to resist the urge to add to your order one of the thick slices of cake stacked two feet high at the edge of the counter. Trust me, you don't want to resist. The chili dogs may have made Ben's fame, but the cake is as light and moist as your mother's own.

Andrea and I stopped in at Ben's Saturday around three o'clock. As we fell asleep at midnight, we realized that we had skipped dinner without even noticing. Neither of us had an appetite again until noon the next day.

2004-01-19T17:09:00.000-05:00

Other people's proseOther people's prose:

Boston has a metropolitan economy and metropolitan-scale commuter routes--a gigantic tangle of expressways, subways and streetcar lines. But it has never coalesced into a metropolitan city. Its style is resolutely small-town--small-town emptiness, small-town sprawl, small-town isolation; it exudes the wet Sunday afternoon atmosphere of the dull province where there's no place to go, no big-city freedom, no glamour. Everything about Boston--its architecture and size, its strange concentration of eccentric talents--should have made it an exciting city. But no. This is not what Boston wanted. It craved discreet uneventfulness, the calm of a vast, woody suburb. Like so many American cities, it has succeeded in landing itself up in a terrible, anomalous mess.

Jonathan Raban in Soft City (1974).

2004-01-15T22:41:00.000-05:00

Other people's proseOther people's prose:

In today's great cities, the most visible and vociferous inhabitants tend to be useless (by any standards which rate bread as being of greater utility than circuses), disproportionately well-paid for their uselessness, equipped with the money, the time and inclination to spend a large portion of their lives shopping.

Johnathan Raban in Soft City (1974).

2004-01-15T22:32:00.000-05:00

English accentsGeorge Mason University has collected audio samples of almost 300 native and non-native English speakers. If you carefully study the samples for the 15 official languages of India, you might be able to identify the native tongue of your operator the next time you call for technical support. [via Boing Boing]

2004-01-14T23:26:00.000-05:00

DCAWashington's Reagan National Airport sits almost inside the D.C. city limits, which makes it both convenient and dangerous. From my apartment on the opposite side of town, I can be at the arrival gates in 15 minutes if I hit all the green lights and the traffic is light.

After you round the back of the Tidal Basin on 395, the road runs parallel to the air strip. You can race the jumbo jets as the arrive over your shoulder and descend a few hundred yards away. In my experience the jets always win.

Photo bonus: All this week Frolic Photo will feature images of National Airport.

2004-01-14T22:35:00.000-05:00

WritingDonald Shaw, a caustic old Brit who taught in my graduate department, gave me the best advice about writing I've ever heard: "Always take notes in complete sentences." Many times a few complete sentences, dashed off when a thought first occurred to me, have been the catalyst to overcome a block and even survived, unedited, into a final draft.

2004-01-13T22:52:00.000-05:00

Spalding GraySpalding Gray, the writer and monologist, has been reported missing by his wife. He disappeared Sunday, and given his recent bouts of depression and attempts at suicide many are fearing that he took his life. His brother Rockwell described Spalding's mood at Christmas: "I wouldn't say he was in a happy state. It wasn't unusual. He's been in a fairly depressed condition for some time."

When I grew up in Oklahoma, books were hard to find and my taste were shaped by the motley assortment of titles I managed to acquire. Gray's Sex and Death to Age 14 was one of the books I read many times. He seemed exotic and sophisticated in a way I never thought I could be. I suppose now, between the internet and Barnes and Noble, curious kids can get a hold of anything to read. I wonder, though, if the books they find feel less like private discoveries.

Although I'm pessimistic, I hope Spalding Gray's life has a happy ending for the time being.

2004-01-13T20:55:00.000-05:00

CorsairesRuss, over at This Paris Review, played his first game of "semi-pro American football in a second-tier French league" this Sunday. I'm happy to report that Russ and the Corsaires won handily.

Everywhere we go, people want to know, who we are, so we tell them: we are the Corsaires, the mighty mighty Corsaires!

2004-01-13T20:45:00.000-05:00

Gilbert NealGilbert Neal, writing in Salon, describes life as a 35 year-old wasting away working in a call center. I spent a few days in a similar place, and like Neal I remember being uncomfortable about using my real name and worrying that some old acquaintance would recognize me from the other end of line. [via Frogs and Ravens]

2004-01-13T20:25:00.000-05:00

ContractA slight look of terror crossed my boss's face when I mentioned that his company's contract with my temp agency expired at the end of March. I think this means he'll find a way to keep me around. I hope so, because I really need the money.

2004-01-12T22:44:00.000-05:00

KucinichHe will never sleep in the White House, but I no longer doubt that Dennis Kucinich rocks. Outside the metro this evening, I was handed a postcard promoting the outside candidate from Ohio. With its damaged font, pink hue, and background of graffiti, it looked more like a ticket to goth Valentine dance than a political flier.

With only Kucinich, Dean, Sharpton, and Braun in the running, the D.C. primary feels more like a class election than a stage in the race for the presidency. Why I Hate D.C. suggests that the four should engaged in a battle to the death instead of an election, but losing most of these candidates would take all the fun out of the Democratic nomination process.

2004-01-12T22:18:00.000-05:00

UnemploymentIraqis continue to riot over a lack of jobs. I can only imagine what it's like to live in a country where millions of people are unemployed and the government in charge seems unconcerned.

Regarding unemployment in our own country, CalPundit looks at the odd practice of not counting the discouraged job seeker as unemployed, why men and college graduates are more likely to give up searching for a job, and whether the rising number of people on disability actually makes the unemployment figures look rosier than reality.

2004-01-11T15:20:00.000-05:00

DreamLast night, I dreamed that I took a ride on the Goodyear blimp. An open air gondola had been attached beneath the big grey blimp, and a small group of us had bought tickets for the ride. We were in Spain, and it seemed familiar at the street level. Salamanca, perhaps? As we rose above the buildings, though, I was confused, since the top of the town didn't look like any Spanish city I knew. Too much red title and undulating patterns on the roofs. It looked Italian to me, but maybe Spanish cities look different from the air.

Dark clouds were gathering, so the crew decided to light tiki torches along the edge of the wicker gondola. That didn't seem like a good idea to me, but riding straight into a storm in a basket hanging from a blimp wasn't wise either. Suddenly, I blacked out.

When I awoke, I was lying on the floor of an abandoned, bombed-out three story apartment building. My wallet and my boots were neatly arranged on a table beside me. Outside, many other buildings were damaged and surrounded with rubble. All the phones were out of service. I found a newspaper, whose headline was devoted to the great blimp disaster. The article didn't give the cause of the crash, and I couldn't remember if lightening hit the blimp or, Hinderburg-like, the tiki torches set it on fire. The article did say that no one survived. Without a working phone in the town, I couldn't think of way to let people know that I miraculously survived the conflagration of the Goodyear blimp.