August 13, 2016
There Ought to Be Clowns
I sort of swore off writing about clowns earlier this summer, but I’ve continued to hear their shuffling feet and their muffled laughs. A couple of weeks ago, former Texas […]
July 1, 2016
Get Back
I injured my back in mid-April—and my recovery, or lack of recovery, has been, at times, painful and demoralizing. So I’ve spent much of the past two months on my […]
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 […]
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 […]
May 21, 2015
Doubling Down on the Clown (Part Two)
Here’s a holiday (of sorts) that I’d never heard of until this afternoon: Red Nose Day. It’s today! May 21! Or really tonight, from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. (EST) on […]
January 18, 2015
Doubling Down on the Clown (Part One)
Reading Peter Baker’s piece in today’s New York Times about the two older Bush brothers, I came across these 1988 statements by the youngest brother, Marvin: “Jeb is the serious […]