On Friday, November 25, The Waterford (Wis.) Post ran a column from me about the presidential election. Waterford is my hometown. The short essay, written in both shock and grief at the election of Donald Trump, is a call to prayer and resistance. An image of the column as it appeared in the paper is here below (click […]
Last week, the New York Times ran a travel story by Lynn Freehill-Maye about the David Foster Wallace’s youthful stomping grounds of central Illinois. In my class about Wallace we’ve read loads about this part of the world, and I was thrilled to see this in the paper and to be able to share it with my students. […]
This expression on James Baldwin’s face was my expression a few weeks ago as the returns came in. It may also capture Baldwin’s reaction to my early efforts to teach him. I’ve gone back to teach his work this semester, and I hope I’ve done better. But an account of my teaching him during the Obama […]
The Los Angeles Review of Books is running a new essay from me about love, God, our democracy, and the writer Marilynne Robinson. Here’s a snippet. For all we say about love and its relationship to openness and our knowledge of the person we love (and vice versa), as it’s practiced day to day, love actually depends […]
We talked in my David Foster Wallace class this week about Dostoevsky (specifically about Wallace’s review of Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky), and some students raised the possibility that (publicly) reading a book like The Brothers Karamazov, say, might earn its reader some strange, disapproving looks. The same might be said for Moby-Dick, or Ulysses, or, who knows, Wallace’s own Infinite Jest. In September, and in […]
This week in my course on David Foster Wallace, we read several pieces, including the story “The Depressed Person,” the essay “Shipping Out” (more famously known as “A Supposedly Fun Think I’ll Never Do Again), and Jonathan Franzen’s “Farther Away.” Students recalled poems by Mary Karr that deepened the conversation, including “Face Down” and “Suicide Note: An […]
An excerpt from the break-up opus In 2003, The Onion ran a story titled “Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Break-Up Letter at Page 20.” I’ve seen it a million times, and it’s still funny. (So are this and this.) I showed this piece to my Wallace class this week when it came around (again) on the Wallace-l listserv, […]
A student presented an essay about NYC psychics today in Literary Journalism and American Belief, and we discussed in the workshop the actual stakes involved in pursing a psychic reading. This discussion reminded me of a memorable This American Life segment by a friend Rosie Schaap (who, after Muhammad Ali died, wrote a wonderful essay, complete with […]
A student in Literary Journalism and American Belief has been talking with me lately about a story she’s writing about Indonesian fashion designer Anniesa Hasibuan, who presented at New York Fashion Week a collection of outfits all accompanied by hijabs. Our conversations led me to send her a link to a new Michael Chabon essay, “My Son, the Prince of […]
