May 10, 2016
Trump, Galumphing
So it’s finally come to pass: Someone as qualified to be president as I am (and I’m not at all qualified) will represent a major American political party in November’s […]
May 3, 2016
Clowns and Poetry (Part Two)
A few days ago, each student in my clown class submitted a new course syllabus as part of a final portfolio. How, I had asked them, might the class be […]
April 22, 2016
Clowns and Poetry (Part One)
Ann Arbor’s weather of late has been a bit berserk. It snowed two weeks ago; then it was eighty degrees. Today it’s gray and rainy, conditions that pass for spring-like […]
April 7, 2016
AWP: When Writers Attack
Last week, on a flight from Detroit to Los Angeles, I read Chuck Sambuchino’s When Clowns Attack: A Survival Guide. I was preparing for the AWP Conference—an annual 12,000-person pileup […]
March 25, 2016
Vocabulary Lesson
What’s the relationship between being able to appreciate something and being able to speak about it? Last month I saw a performance—Black Girl: Linguistic Play, by Camille A. Brown’s dance […]
March 22, 2016
“Clown” as Epithet
In the 1924 film He Who Gets Slapped, the scholar Paul Beaumont (played by Lon Chaney) is betrayed by his patron, the Baron, in front of an academy of scientists. […]
March 8, 2016
Clowns and War Stories (Part Two)
Nicholas Kristof imagines, in a recent New York Times op-ed column, “President Donald J. Trump in a tense international crisis, indignant and impatient, with his sweaty finger on the nuclear […]
March 2, 2016
Clowns and War Stories (Part One)
In last week’s New York Times, Jason Zinoman wrote about sad and creepy clowns.* His central question: “How did red noses become such bad news?” Zinoman identifies the late ’80s […]
February 19, 2016
Un-Valentine’s Day
Just as Humpty Dumpty celebrated un-birthdays, some of us at the University of Michigan on Monday celebrated Un-Valentine’s Day. Our cupcakes were topped with hearts, yes; but they were also […]
February 18, 2016
The Metaphorical Killing of Ted Nugent
I took my clown class to a show last week: Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music: 1960s–1980s. Mac has been working his way through our country’s two dozen […]
February 5, 2016
The Sultan of Nonsense
Last week, on this blog, I asked a question that I didn’t try to answer: “Where is the great nonsense of our time?” Might it be found in the lines […]
January 31, 2016
Clowns and Art
In “Fun That’s No Fun,” the preface to Cindy Sherman’s book of 2003-2004 clown photographs, Maik Schlüter writes, “The act of fun is forever orbiting the tragedy of life.” You […]