Recently I happened to return to a long-forgotten topic that preoccupied me some thirteen years ago when I was a student in Berlin: the poet Gottfried Benn and his ostentatious acceptance of National Socialism in 1933. While updating the bibliography for my old undergraduate paper, to be published as an article in a professional journal, I came across a quotation from Benn’s letter to his friend Oelze written on January 27, 1933, which rather ...

I owe it all to the zoo. Thanks to reading, the topic of the zoo has been with me for much longer than experience of actual zoos has been. And it was through the zoo that I made my entrance into the world of letters, an event that, unusually for me, has a precise date: August 26, 1963. I was three and a half years old.

I raised a tiny glass of rum before lunch to the name and honor of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose death on November 1 at the age of 100 was announced today. His extreme old age was painful, I heard. Not that he was in physical pain, but he felt anger and disappointment at the way human beings treat each other and the finite environment we share. Nobody would deny that we are infinitely better at killing each other and at fouling our collective nes...

When I read literature about Kurosawa’s ambiguous position between the East and the West, I see a tendency to construe the relationship between Western and Japanese sensibility as a chasm and to discuss Kurosawa’s work in terms of his attempts to bridge it. But this bridge always appears to me as rather a forced construction, which in the end only re-enforces the sense of a fundamental gap between the East and the West.

I don’t know any more what exactly motivated my friend and me several years ago to visit the American Museum of Natural History at Central Park West and 79th Street, a place favored primarily by dating lovers and families with children. It was one of our several forays into NYC’s tourist zones of attraction, quite inappropriate for us, as we were permanent inhabitants of the metropolis and its region. Most likely, we were procrastinating vis-à...

OK, so I was listening to a friend today who was concerned that people had invested “messianic” hopes in Obama. Hopes that he would solve all our problems and leave us something extra under the tree at Christmas. To my mind the difference between the Obamacious candidate and the Bush II knock-off is extreme, maybe even world-historical or sublime in proportion, but if we have to worry about something, let it be about whether he can...

For a few years now we’ve had this bedtime ritual: we take turns saying five things we’re thankful for. As I sat down to write this I couldn’t remember why we began the practice; but looking back at my old blogs I see that it was a response to W’s increasing desire for the things (and brands) his friends had. I wanted to take some time each day to acknowledge and appreciate what we already had. His first list (made while in the bathroom brushi...

One of the few good things about moving, which I otherwise abhor, is that it gives you a chance to clean house, to take stock of your accumulations and sort out the clutter. Because we’ve moved so much in the past ten years, we’ve managed to divest ourselves of much of the kind of junk that can usually pile up unnoticed in the backs of closets and in basement storage spaces. This puts us at a disadvantage at white elephant parties when a truly...

I took a little spin around Stone Mountain the other day. Why did I do that? Well, a friend of mine who was educated in Germany has often expressed astonishment at seeing streets, high schools, airports and the like named for Confederate statesmen and generals. They don't do this in Germany-- no matter how many Nazi uniforms are hidden in the back of family closets, there is no Rudolf-Hess-Strasse, etc. So, my friend says, how is it that the ...

K Klingensmith’s post “Pictures of You.,” on medical images of the body, asks the question, “For the person who sees a copy of their X-ray, MRI, or sonogram, how can it seem like their body?” I’m fascinated with this complicated sense of dissonance between the body that we experience and the image that we see — between the body that we experience and the mystery of its inner workings, proceeding without our knowledge or control. What stories ...

When we bought the new place, we tried for a while to get something nearer campus. But what we liked we couldn't afford, and what we could afford close to campus were houses that required lots of work. So we ended up buying a place about seven minutes' drive from school, which is still nothing. The whole feel of the town is much more “American” in all the conventional ways than the places I'd lived over the past six years, and cer...

C Bush's post about the seasonality of baseball got me thinking about my own spring time sports associations. In February, the lake near my apartment was frozen 6 inches deep, so the university sent out an e-mail inviting everyone to ice skate. The cold snap lasted for a couple of weeks, before the temperatures swung erratically up and down again. Nearly every morning, I drive by the school's boathouse, out of which the crew teams train, and ...

A conference right in the middle of a semester’s teaching is a nice change of pace, but there’s plenty of work waiting for you when you get back. So, today’s post is, depending on how you look at it, a Do-it-yourself Printculture Post Kit (pieces included, you put them together) or an homage to Larry King’s old USA Today column (or at least Nor.m Macdonald’s parody of it.)

Matthew Miller was a Jewish stoner who dropped out of high school in upstate New York to follow the hippie jam-band Phish around the country. He grew his hair in dreadlocks and listened to Grateful Dead tapes. After finishing his studies at a wilderness school in Oregon, where he rapped at open mikes and practiced beatboxing in his bedroom, he moved to New York to attend college at the lefty-alternative New School. Sometime around 2001, he ...

M Massino's post yesterday made me momentarily nostalgic for my own grad school days playing Tetris to avoid working on the dissertation. But only momentarily—I have no desire to return to a time when the albatross called “ABD” hung heavily around my neck. What I do remember fondly, however, are the Thanksgivings I spent in the California desert, where a motley group of us tried our hand at putting together a turkey-centered feas...

(Or: Which charge takes precedence?) [formerly: Inspirer of Genocide. And Plagiarist? And Sloppy Reader?] A fine red dust floats in the air in Rwanda, the result of the slow attrition of volcanic rock. It permeates your clothes and shows up on your bath-towel. It’s a strangely inorganic trace to find associated with a country whose most potent image in the mind is still, twelve years after the event, the schoolyards and churches carpeted with...

As a kind of summer break, today I’ll just present some of the juicier highlights from the 2000 Gore-Bush debates, courtesy of the Commission on Presidential Debates. Many readers, no doubt, will remember the Governor of Texas saying that global warming was a theory that, um, hotly contested in the scientific community and would need more research. And you’ve got to love his criticisms of the Clinton administration’s lack of bipartisanship. Bu...

I’ve been making lists today, as usual—lists with top and bottom items, lists that have been through a lot of additions and retractions, lists in multiple colors. I have precedent: Writing begins with lists. Lists of kings; lists of cattle, goats, captives, acreage, shields, and units of grain, beer, oil. Lists of who owed what to whom. There is an entire literature consisting only of lists: the corpus of writings in Mycenaean Linear B, deciph...

Denis Diderot once spoke with a girl who had been blind from birth, who said to him, “I wonder what people mean when they say the word ‘mind.’ I think it must be something like a big hand in the head.”

A recent wire story reports that in “a bizarre twist” Japan’s “camera phone craze [has spread] to funerals.” Despite a brief indication at the end of the story that such behavior might be a useful memento for the modern age, the story presses the idea that to take a picture at a funeral is disrespectful in the extreme: "'I get the sense that people no longer respect the dead. It's disturbing,' a funeral director told the Mainichi Shimbun ne...

Short track speed skating first came to my attention during the 1998 Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan. I was half-way around the world in Paris, France, where I’d gone to join my boyfriend, who was studying abroad and researching his dissertation. I had arrived right before the New Year, and it was early February; my sweetie had proposed on my birthday just a few weeks before (I accepted), and as if to test the “in sickness” part ahead o...

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, mostly because it isn’t Christmas and doesn’t involve buying presents. Also, there aren’t too many annoying holiday jingles about Thanksgiving. And if October has the requisite pumpkins by the doorstep as its décor, and the rest of the post-Thanksgiving holiday blitz is what it is, November, and its major holiday, has few decorating imperatives. If you’ve got kids, you put a multi-co...

Driving home from a trip to Long Island the other day, I couldn’t help but remark once again that Long Island is a depressing place, or more precisely, the place depresses me in a way I find difficult to explain. There are many places I’ve been or passed through that seem broken down and faded, like old boxes of crackers gathering dust on a forgotten shelf of a convenience store. But that’s not what’s depressing about t...

I pulled an all-nighter to write my first college English paper, on an electric typewriter. The paper was on Beowulf and I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. I got a disappointing B on it. But it wasn’t just a B. It arrived with the phantom of another grade; for my professor had blotted out the + or – next to the B with such thoroughness that no amount of holding the paper up to the light could determine whether she had demo...

At a recent tutor training meeting for the Writing Center, the get-to-know-you activity included sharing three random facts about yourself. Perhaps because I was in a room full of undergrads, I said, “when I was in college, I rowed crew and at one point, I could bench press my body weight.” From the vantage point of my life now, spent mostly in front of my computer doing mental labor, the memory of this physical feat made me painfu...