Crossover/Combover: A performance piece (Approach 3: from ASA 2010)
(This is a very lightly revised version of the paper I tried to deliver at the American Studies Association conference as a performance piece that also riffed on the talks just given around me: a...
View ArticleI don’t know if I could do nothing and be that cool with everything
I experimented with taking a day off. It was likely to be a failure, because it had to be an experiment, as I have no habits of leaving the desk, only habits of clawing a path back to it, which is odd...
View ArticleIn the Air (1)
The fantasy of a common sense, a sense of a capacity or of something affectively general at the core of democracy, is not necessarily sentimental. But the drive to create a more capacious democratic...
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Being Alive
Contact. I just saw the most anorexic woman I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot. She was walking in 90 degree heat in full Gaga: white face, red lip, yellow blonde streaks all beautifully blown out...
View ArticleFather, Can’t You See I’m Burning?
I’m converting a cafeteria to a café—Valois just got wi-fi and I wanted to be in a capacious space, light with big tables and no soundtrack. It’s empty, almost, mid-afternoon. A few old people are...
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For example
I noticed, over the last few months, as my mother was dying, that I had taken pictures that seemed very specific. Now I am looking at the archive, as one appraises a drying hand after a manicure. My...
View ArticleThe Book of Love is long and boring, no one can lift the damn thing . . .
Delaminated from week 1 lecture notes, Love Theory (Winter 2012)… I am a love theorist. I sometimes feel dissociated from all my loves. I sometimes ask them to hold more of an image of me than I can...
View ArticleThe Trumping of Politics
Consider the following examples: Clint Eastwood: I would just like to say something, ladies and gentlemen. Something that I think is very important. It is that, you, we — we own this country....
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The Game (3)
3. What is the wish of the dream? I open my hand and a small cluster of people peer up at me out of it silent and bug-eyed. I draw them out of my palm like taffy, but there is no snapping sound and no...
View ArticleTrump, or Political Emotions
I wrote this column in case anyone’s going to be teaching the election this fall. *** Trump, or Political Emotions Dear America, if I read one more article about the Danger of Political Emotions in an...
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