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"The Jumper" Trillium Literary Journal, Fall 2007, 80-83  

"Debauchery Next Door: The Boundaries of Shame in Abigail's Party"
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 24.4. July 2007, 317-323.


    The play that became Abigail's Party began life as an experiment devised by director Mike Leigh with five actors – including his then-wife, Alison Steadman – at the Hampstead Theater in London. Given basicharacter outlines and six weeks for rehearsal, these five actors partly improvised the original production that was later used as the basis of Mike Leigh's script for the BBC's Play for Today, first screened on November 5, 1977. Although incidental details of time and place initially seem vital elements of Abigail's Party , by most accounts the play has dated well, and there have been regular revivals, including a highly-acclaimed recent performance at the play's original venue, the Hampstead Theater.  ...read more…

I Was a Brain Slave!  originally published in Guinea Pig Zero, September 2006.

   Before Marlow leaves for Africa in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, his new employers send him to see the corporation doctor if he's in fit shape, both physically and psychologically, to make the harrowing journey down the Congo. After taking his pulse, the doctor asks Marlow "with a certain eagerness" if he'd mind having his head measured.  ...read more…

A Study of Reading Habits originally published in Rokovoko, August 2006.

   Not many of us get through school, not to mention college, without developing our own imperatives and superstitions around reading and the feelings associated with it, whether these are feelings of pleasure, affection, guilt, dread, anxiety, or simple indifference. As we grow older, these emotions tend to linger in our private lives, whether we continue to read avidly, or recoil at the very sight of a book. No one has more insight into the confluence between reading and memory than Marcel Proust, and no one has written so well on the subject, or at such length. In this passage from Time Regained, the narrator describes the effect of this synergy:   ...read more...

Is the Internet a Portal to Hell? originally published in Bad Subjects, 74. August 2005.

   Christian organizations, censorship advocates, moral crusaders and other fans of "family values" regularly express a profoundly superstitious terror of the power of th Internet to wreak havoc in our lives, to turn us all into perverts and porn fiends, child-abusers and serial killers. In the conservative media, the Internet is conceived as the gateway to a monstrous otherworld, and the corresponding assumption that pixels on a screen can cause rape and murder is rarely called into question. Many women, and perhaps even more men, seem especially terrified by the power of pornography to sexually arouse the viewer, thereby forming a potent threat to all those lies that are perpetuated in the name of the family.  ...read more…

Nutty Professors  originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 September 2005

Ask anybody what adjective goes best with the word "professor," and the answer will almost certainly be "absent-minded," or possibly "nutty." Popular culture is full of addlebrained academics, whether they be villainous madmen like Professor Morbius in Forbidden Planet or Sherlock Holmes's archenemy Professor Moriarty; crazy cranks like Professor Emmett Brown in Back to the Future, or well-meaning but harebrained eccentrics like Professor Brainard in The Absent-Minded Professor, Professor Branestawm in Norman Hunter's children's television series, Professor Pat Pending in the Hanna Barbera cartoon Wacky Races, or Professor Dumbledore of Harry Potter fame. ...read more…  

Touching the Void in Our Lives (written with David Sterritt), originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 september 2004.

     In the first act of Othello, the Moor tells Desdemona's father how he won her heart by regaling her with stories of his thrilling adventures -- of "most disastrous chances,/Of moving accidents by flood and field;/Of hair-breadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach." Desdemona quickly came to love him "for the dangers [he] had pass'd," and she's not alone in her appetite for tales of marvelous survival feats. These days, though, we prefer our adventure stories -- like everything else, it seems -- to be excessive and overblown, equivalent to the gluttonous "Extreme Gulp" soft drink you can purchase at a nearby convenience store .  ....read more… 

The Two Freuds-The Cultural and the Clinical originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 July 2004.

I knew there was something a little old-fashioned about my psychoanalytic training institute when I saw a note in the catalog mentioning that smoking was permitted in the building -- Smoking? In New York? In the workplace? -- but only in the director's office. Ah, of course. I immediately thought of Freud and his famous cigars. The director is a small, elderly gentleman with a white beard and a heavy German accent. His office contains the traditional analytic couch and is cluttered with exotic wooden figurines, mostly of ancient gods and goddesses, in the style of Freud's famous consulting room. He keeps framed photographs of Freud on his desk, and there's a large picture of Freud hanging in the hall outside his office. The director smokes a pipe rather than a cigar, but the resemblance to his idol appears deliberately cultivated.  ...read more…

Teachers' Pets, originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 9, 2004.

When I attended a job interview at the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore, I was surprised to see a number of dogs -- indoors in the art studios as well as outdoors in the public areas. When I asked about this, I was told that MICA has a long tradition of allowing pets on the campus, and that students are even permitted to bring their dogs to class. In my experience, such a policy is rare, perhaps even unique, among institutions of higher education. Of course, there are strict rules about pet behavior at the institute. The official pet policy states: "Pets on campus must be kept on a leash and should be controlled by their owner so that they are not a problem for members of the MICA community. They may not roam freely through studios, classrooms, offices, or public spaces." Additionally, pets are not permitted anywhere on the campus where food is prepared or served. ...read more…