Blog Archive

George Blaustein, an editor of the European Review of Books and a professor of American Studies in Amsterdam, wrote an essay in The Dial about teaching American Studies in Europe. It’s a very good piece about the widening and now narrowing of “American Studies” and America as a place (and a story) that ends with this line:

Ten rules for rules for writers … Note: This essay was inspired some time ago by an online discussion about jargon and seniority, as well as by discussions about academic writing in which I found myself qualifying my recommendations by acknowledging that power and authority deformed them.

I haven’t mentioned this before, but there’s a large WWII American cemetery about 6 kilometers from where we live, the only one in the Netherlands. Because it’s 80 years since liberation, the annual concert at the cemetery was especially big, and my 8 year old son and I went. It was a pleasant evening of music, stories, and appropriate honoring of the dead.

Bye Bye I Love You has organized my life for the last five years. I’ve been explaining that it was the predicate for my life. It structured other decisions. After my family, it was my priority. If something didn’t serve the book, it was jettisoned. So maybe I should explain what I mean by “the predicate.” Which is also a pleasure to say.

I wrote this in the early 2000s, based on some notes I took in the 1990s, when I would ride the train from Boston to Haverhill. The station is obviously North Station, but before the renovations. I haven't been there in decades. The renovations have probably been renovated. Anyway, you can clearly tell that I wrote this under the sway of Joseph Mitchell and Malcolm Lowry, stylistically anyway.

[This was my last column for the Observant, the newspaper at Maastricht University, where I've written four pieces a year for four years] Endings … That idea that came to me in 2017–the idea that more should be known about language at the end of life, and that language at the beginning of life might shed light on it–became several pieces of journalism and academic articles…