scattered memories of challenger

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what i remember is all of the adults in my life going into the den and shutting the door.

that’s not actually an accurate memory, as it was my mother and ann, our cleaner, and then, later, my dad. but that’s the memory. the adults in a room with the door shut and me, age 4 1/2, on the other side of it.

this was the year after The Year Everyone Died– my friend from next door, my mother’s grandfather, my father’s boss– so we were already, then, somewhat a house in mourning. or, at the very least, a house that had spent a lot of the previous year avoiding discussion of grief and death whilst living submerged within it.

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the pathos of jackie kennedy dolls on etsy, vol. 4, no. 1

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this is a thing we historically have done so i’mma just dive right on in.

if you’re like DOCTOR ONLINE WUT EVEN IS THIS, i refer you to my rich seam of informal, doctoral-level scholarship on emotions and dolls: HERE.

ya’ll.

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my life with jackie, redux; or, on melancholy

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it is like a nesting doll, all of it. my life with jackie, my writing about jackie. so that when i read the pages i have written about jackie, the whole book i have written on her life, it unpacks a whole series of memories of my own.

where i was when i wrote that sentence.

who i was sitting next to at the british library when i found that quote. (invariably, always, obviously, nanette.)

what i didn’t know was about to happen when i was in that archive.

the feeling of the wind in my hair and the blue blue sky above as i walked home after wandering round the yacht.

it is her life and it is mine.

they are, by this point, so braided up. Continue reading →

11/22

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typical, i’ve a strong sense of occasion and nothing really to say. 

today is 22nd november. 

58 years ago, the woman i’ve spent the last 18 years writing about was sitting beside her husband when he was shot by a man using a mail order rifle (retail = $19.95).

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a brief word on this portrayal of duchess kate’s white fragility

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whew, PEOPLE. if ever there was a day built for rage?! and it is not yet noon US EST!

between the horrifying story of a police officer murdering an unnamed Black man in minneapolis, the video of amy cooper calling the police on a birder who asked her to leash her dog, the president of notre dame’s op-ed in the times about the risks we must all sustain for the education of students (ie. the continuation of american football), AND the president of purdue’s op-ed in the post about moral responsibility of reopening in the fall (ie. capitalism and the continuation of american football), i would like to go back to bed and spend the day reading my trashy novel about a kept woman falling madly in love a rake with waterloo PTSD while teaching him how to cheat at vingt-et-un in regency england.

ALAS, NO. i cannot do that, because today is also the day that the daily mail posted this nonsense.

which, if we’re in some sort of white supremacy/white fragility/white tears carnival time– and that does increasingly seem to be what was meant by “reopening”– hardly ranks supreme. but it is nonetheless, stupidly consistent with this broader alignment of the racist stars and worth a gander, especially due to the subtlety of the pandering and the broader agenda of thumbs up-ing white femininity. (please, lawd, this is not the gemini season i wanted.) Continue reading →

the pathos of jackie kennedy dolls on etsy, vol. 3, no. 2

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yup. ’tis time. saddle up.

as you know, this ain’t our first rodeo. we’ve peered deep into the hell hole of jackie kennedy doll photographs on etsy multiple times before.

somehow, amid 15 moves and 14 jobs and myriad other responsibilities, over the last five years, i have produced a rich seam of informal, doctoral-level scholarship on dolls. you are welcome.

#thingsforwhichtherearenonationalappreciationdays

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this is what it feels like to be teaching college right now

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it was very overcast. the clouds hung very low.

i think it was probably a thursday. one of the thursdays where i did three shows and then i took my #adjunctfashion and my sore knee home and i collapsed, ate a giant bowl of pasta and watched vanderpump rules for three hours to decompress before falling into bed.

the thing i remember is experiencing such a sense of relief, as i walked up the hill out of campus, past the national basilica, past the nuns and the priests, towards the metro, for what may have been the last time.

i remember so little.

but i do remember the relief. though i do not specifically remember why, on that particular day. beyond maybe the fact that i felt like they were finally all on board, or at least a plurality. we’d reached the tipping point in the semester where, by the sheer force of my personality, i had won them over.

they wanted to write for me. they were ready, i had primed them, i had put in the work and i had earned their trust and they were ready to write for me. it was going to be a good year.

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on jessica simpsons’s memoir

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i am giving myself exactly one hour and thirty-eight minutes in which to write about this. because there are 19 papers that need to be graded and i’m leaving for an estate sale with a friend at 9:45, but there are things i gots to say.

THE JESSICA SIMPSON MEMOIR IS AMAZING. Continue reading →

a deep reading of t.s. eliot’s letter from the beyond

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dear people, yesterday, mister thomas stearns eliot spoke to us from the beyond and revealed himself to be the petty jackass we always thought he was.

this may seem a digression but then that just means you never knew me in my alternate life as someone who twice attended and twice taught at the t.s. eliot international summer school. which was A Time, let me tell you.

to the degree that when tom hiddleston wore that i ❤ t.s. shirt, much of my enthusiasm about it lay in the fact that the eliot school started the following week and we could use it as the opening slide of a powerpoint presentation.

that said, in all honesty, i do not think i’ve thought about this man AT ALL in the last two years. things were going on, time passed, i taught rhetoric and tried to reshape my students’ perceptions of who can be a writer by engineering syllabi almost entirely devoid of white dudes. which means i’ve no longer spent summers thinking about the emily hale letters.

but, whew boy! here they are. Continue reading →