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More from Houston

It’s been a long week and I’m tired of typing.  On top of all this here blogging, I wrote an essay with Janet for this Sunday’s Boston Globe, and I’m going over the page proofs for an essay on “Disability and Narrative” that’s slated for the next issue of PMLA (look for it at your local newsstand!).  So enough verbiage already—it’s time for some pictures!

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Here’s Jamie on the balcony of our room at Houston’s Warwick Hotel, overlooking the Museum of Fine Arts.

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In the Reptile House.  Jamie and I have a little routine with behemoth pythons like these guys.  I freeze in terror and say, “pythons!” He says, “Michael”—I have been “Michael” for about a year now—“don’t be scared.” I point at them with a trembling hand and say, “but they would squeeze me like a balloon,” and he says, “they will not squeeze you like a balloon—there, there,” patting my head.  He thinks this is really funny.  We have versions of this routine for great white sharks, tarantulas, and the dementors in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

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Chameleons are cool.


What’s this doing here?  Well, I just got my first sales report from Blackwell, and it appears that some of you haven’t bought your copy yet.  (Yes, I’m looking at you.) It’s so easy, too!  They’re still for sale right here.  Each one comes with a defense of the formal analysis of works of art; an argument that subcultural analysis has long been interested in the aesthetics of social forms even if it doesn’t always put it that way; a critique of the idea that the primary task of cultural studies is to determine a work’s place in the War of Position; a series of essays on the role of evaluation in popular culture; and this colorful cover, a detail from Liza Lou‘s Kitchen.  Something for the whole family!  (And my thanks to David Banash for a very nice review.)

Have a fun weekend and a fine April Fool’s Day, everyone.

Posted by on 04/01 at 07:59 AM

  1. Awesome photos! Tell Jamie he’s waaaaay braver than I am--no way I’d go that near one python, much less two!

    Point of clarification: Is Jamie wearing an Illini shirt? Michael, are you indoctrinating him?

    Posted by  on  04/01  at  11:02 AM

  2. Hey Jamie: If you ever visit the Bay Area, a visit to the East Bay Vivarium in Berkeley is going to have to be on your itinerary. (There are cafés close by where Michael can hide if he’s feeling snake-o-phobic that day.)

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  04/01  at  02:08 PM

  3. Actually, Sian, it’s not an Illini shirt.  The orange and blue is just a coincidence (and one of my least favorite color schemes, by the way).  Chris, thanks for the invite!  And the link-- Jamie will love it.  “Brand new pythons!” he’ll say, or words to that effect. . . .

    Posted by Michael  on  04/01  at  03:30 PM

  4. Jamie on the balcony, way cool; is that really Houston behind him? Michael, you got the one angle from which Houston looks good. Those pythons appear to be gigantic. And what’s with the yellow one? They are gorgeous, but...sorry, Jamie, they really are scarey looking.

    Michael, I have bought my copy of the book above, and am happily enjoying it, but I happened to catch on C-span last week, Roger Kimball, doing a museum presentation it looked like, in which, with his customary committment to the bright neon clairty of any truth worth our notice, he was explicating for his audience, the dangerous, obsfucating poppycock that is all current academic art criticism.  What better way to not thank him for all the smart, dumb bile he’s lavished on academic criticism as we’ve come to know and love it over the years, than to give your book to selected friends? As Al Franken constantly remarks about his own books, yours make excellent gifts.

    Posted by Leah A  on  04/02  at  02:39 PM

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