I’ve often wanted to sit down and write an essay on what I call the accidental novel. What, you may ask… Well, it’s a book that was written as a work of nonfiction but that shows a different story than it tells. Read along with me for a moment and you’ll see. The accidental novel…
Tag: books
Kissing Rosalyn
When I was a teenager, I spent several summers at a Montessori-inspired hippie socialist utopian creative-and-performing arts camp. The eight weeks I spent at camp were a respite from trying to contort myself to fit in enough during the rest of the school year. Camp was a place to be myself. It was a place…
Mr. Misunderstanding: Prof. Parker
In loving memory of David Parker (1943-2015) A Good Teacher is Hard to Find, Episode 2 As there’s no good place to start, let me walkbackwards till, I bump into you. Mr. Misunderstanding On numerous occasions, Prof. Parker asked me to call him David, but for some unknown reason, I had never been able to…
The Nazis are Getting Worse
The Sound of Music was my introduction to Nazis. I can remember watching that scene as a small child, and feeling frightened. I can remember asking about what the flag meant and my mother explaining it. Even without seeing the clip I can recall how chilling the anger is in the scene. The only thing…
Peek inside the Rare Book Room
I want to talk for a bit about what was truly magical about being an academic: the rare book room. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I feel a bit dismal about my own PhD journey. Huge swaths of American Academia are a scam. I’m not alone in thinking this. But. But! There…
It’s Caturday and We Have Questions: Spoilers!
What constitutes a Spoiler: A Philosophical Dialogue It’s Caturday, and Big Cat and Little Cat have been discussing spoilers while they’re waiting for Middle Cat to get back from that spa with the new hair-barfing cleanse. And what they’re discussing, of course, is spoilers. It all started when Little Cat spoiled a scene in The…
Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” Law: Outlawing Openness
Conversations we Can’t Avoid There are a lot of conversations we have to have about things that are uncomfortable or difficult to talk about. We try and avoid things like sex, politics or religion–we label them as “out of bounds” and find less controversial things to talk about with people, but there are always going…
Banned Books Redux?
New Book Bannings A couple of months ago, during Banned Books Week, I wrote that banning books is really about protecting fragile adults, not children. Since then, it seems like there’s been an explosion of efforts to restrict access to books, especially books about queer topics. My own school district in Florida has dealt with…
What it Means to Ban a Book
“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself.” The only book my parents ever took away from me was Catcher in the Rye. There are a lot of reasons someone might want to take that book away from a child. But none of those were the reasons my parents confiscated it from me. My…
Sticking Your Nose in a Book
Do you think books mind when we read them? Here they are carrying on with their lives, being beautiful or terrible according to how they were written, and we come along and literally stick our noses into their business. There are some people—scholars, philosophers, authors—who treat books as if they were alive. I once attended…