February 28, 2017
Citizenship (Part Two)
Earlier today I glanced at my Facebook News Feed and saw, as usual, post after post about the president. He was doing what he always does: playing footsie with the […]
February 6, 2017
Citizenship (Part One)
I’m writing this post on Super Bowl Sunday, a semi-holiday (or day of observance, literally) that’s wholly American. And I’m thinking about what it means to be an American in […]
January 1, 2017
Relentless Ridicule
Because everything I read—even the back of my cereal box*—brings to mind Donald Trump, I could probably continue to draw parallels between the Mad Realtor and his fictional counterparts (Beckett’s […]
December 29, 2016
The Great Work Begins
Late in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika, Belize tells Louis, “You come with me to room 1013 over at the hospital, I’ll show you America. Terminal, crazy […]
December 9, 2016
Trump’s Last Tweet
Nearly twenty years ago, newly arrived in Seattle, I needed help finding an apartment. Online listings were still a few years away, so I signed up for a service that […]
November 26, 2016
November Static
In one of my classes a few weeks ago, we were reading Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. About a third of the way through the novel, Kundera […]
November 7, 2016
Trump and Jackboots (Also: Please Vote)
As I write this post, on a Sunday afternoon, a bit of news breaks: the FBI has finished its latest review of Clinton’s emails and recommends no new action. So […]
November 2, 2016
Trump, Meerkats, and Rhyme
With the possible collapse of our democracy within sight, it seems crazy to spend time writing about rhyme. (Really, I should be on a bus to Ohio or Florida.) But […]
October 25, 2016
The Mad Realtor’s Song
This is my two hundredth post for this blog, and I had planned to mark that milestone by writing about John Berryman. It’s his birthday today—a birthday we should celebrate. […]
October 20, 2016
Your Hateful Little Trump
The most effective way to speak out against Donald Trump (and what he represents) may be to not speak at all. The candidate’s own words make the best case against […]
October 4, 2016
Adventures in Trumpland
What would Lewis Carroll have made of Donald Trump? In an 1875 letter to The Spectator, Carroll (or, really, Charles Dodgson, the don behind the pseudonym) lamented the ways in which the […]
September 28, 2016
Donald the Ogre
W. H. Auden’s “August 1968” has been on my mind recently. The idea that a poet might compose an immediate response to a catastrophe (in this case, the Soviet invasion […]