I first heard that Gordon Ramsay’s television show Hotel Hell was coming to Connecticut to film a segment on Woodbury’s Curtis House about six months ago.  At the time, all I could think of was: oh, my God.  I’ve eaten in a restaurant with a kitchen full of rotting meat and cockroaches. For those of…

Let’s start with 3:20 am on Wednesday morning, which is when I got up in the middle of the night, didn’t bother to turn on the lamp–I never do–and promptly fell right over, hitting the carpet hard with both knees. Then, I couldn’t figure out a way to get up except by crawling into the…

It’s the start of a long week-end, and for reasons that are too complicated for me to go into here, I’m going to spend it going over and over and over a column by Paul Krugman in an attempt to make sure it’s going to be comprehensible to a group of people who don’t want…

Yes, yes.  I know. I disappear for weeks at a time, and then who knows what’s going on? The unfortunate reality–or maybe the fortunate one–is that I sometimes have actual work to do.  Lately there’s been more than usual. For one thing, I’m teaching an actual upper level course this term, one I have  never…

I lived around and in the city of Detroit for a short span of my mid twenties.  It’s one of those periods of my life that I look back on with both fondness and a little embarrassment.  On the one hand, it was a truly revalatory experience–my introduction to the America beyond the East Coast…

Perry Mason had a Cadillac convertible.  I don’t know what color it was, because the show was in black and white except for a single episode, and the convertible didn’t appear on that episode. But Perry Mason had one, at least for the TV show, and the really amazing thing about that was:  time after…

Every once in a while, I have a moment when I really don’t understand how I can claim to be a writer, since I don’t seem to be able to communicate anything to anyone. Yesterday I tried to explain the difference between a totalizing fictional universe and your ordinary everyday fictional universe, and I seem…

So, the last few days I’ve been doing a lot of actual work and not much on the blog, but when I haven’t been working, I’ve been reading. And in another twelve pages or so, I will have finished the last of the appendices at the end of The Lord of the Rings, which means…

When I was very small, I was fascinated by organizations. I think it was the formalities of organizations that I liked–orders of nuns, for instance, and the Girl Scouts with their ranks and badges, and college sororities. I even invented a couple of them, including something I named the Nancy Drew Detective Club, which I…

I am having one of those days when I just can’t seem to settle down no matter what I do. That sounds all angsty and portentious, like one of those movies where some woman just can’t stand her successful New York life anymore and goes off traveling to Cordoba and Tibet in search of meaning.…