Category: memoir
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Memoir: something that went bump in my night, or my first time with the Violent Femmes (1983)
Finks is a second-floor music club on Normal’s Front Street, where they have Augsberger (Light and Dark) on tap. I am 22, a grad student at ISU, and the unappointed taste maker and music critic of my Central Illinois metropolis. I am qualified, having read books by Griel Marcus, listened to old blues recordings, subscribed…
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Memoir: Mother (1961-71)
Oblivious to the presence of my sisters, my mother sighs wistfully to me. She recounts how, with each of her previous three pregnancies, her goal of a male baby had been cruelly deferred. But as a Christian woman, she kept faithfully praying and then–this blessed night at West Suburban Hospital when the nurse handed her…
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Memoir: Eclipse (1973)
Then he picked up a pair of chunky Koss headphones. “And you really should prepare your head for these phones!”
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Memoir: Mom’s racist heritage (1990)
When I was 12, Mom had been pretty incapacitated for the last decade. We younger kids didn’t learn her prejudices until she got sober, her personality melting out of a frozen block of vodka. Turns out, she harbored some downright racist ideas. She held un-generous feelings towards African-Americans, sorting them all into two camps–the uneducated,…
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Memoir: A lineage of male violence (1976-77)
I wake profoundly shaken by this dream, cast down by its revelation, stumbling into the sudden nightmare of day dawning, and I, a virtual parricide.
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Memoir: Where babies come from (1968)
Even dogs, the noblest of creatures in my mind, were stained with the same mammalian taint of bestial inter-penetration. Oh, it was hard for a while to look at dogs, even my beloved Carin Terrier Marilyn, with respect.
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Memoir: Before I met you (pre 2012)
Before I met you, I didn’t know a dosa from a donut or a puja from a post office. Now I enjoy, admire, and even enact your Brahmin heritage with you, a privilege I never imagined possessing. Before I met you, I had grown accustomed and comfortable in my four walls. I’d sit indoors attenuated,…
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Memoir: The Ritz theater (1973)
Merely taking my place in the ticket line, I wasn’t some punk kid, but a real member of society, waiting my turn just like the adults, and then choosing my seat, the same crappy quality as all the other seats.
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Memoir/book review: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Emerson’s idealism encounters Camus’ reckoning with the absurdity of human suffering.
The Wikiness 