Bloggogriff

[Update: I went back to find this quote and realized that it's actually Wilde who said it, not Pater, in "The Critic as Artist"  http://www.wilde-online.info/the-critic-as-artist-page45.html . The Aestheticism catch phrase associated with Pater is "art for art's sake," but I had mixed the two up. Text corrected accordingly.] If you follow me on social media, you already know I’ve been teaching Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray for the last couple months, and that I’ve been completely obsessed with it. I’ve been having a wonderful time teaching the book; in particular it’s been charming to see my student come in to class having super emotional reactions like “Oh my God! I hate Lord Henry!” while inside I’m thinking “I kind of want to BE Lord Henry,” but that’s beside the point. In the course of teaching this novel, I’ve been thinking a lot about Aestheticism, and in particular Walter Pater’s  Wilde's assertion that aesthetics are higher th...

The piece below is something I wrote a little over a year ago. At the time I felt like it represented a real ‘happy ending’ point in my life, a reckoning with the issues I had while we were living in the UK that I had long kept fairly quiet about because of the shame I felt around them. Watching a friend endure something similar last fall somehow unlocked the words for me -- even though, until now, I haven’t shown them to anyone but that one person.   Here it goes: ———— January 2018 People ask me a lot about what it was like living abroad. For a long time -- the whole time we were there -- I couldn’t answer that question honestly. I’ve had three major depressive periods in my life, each lasting about two years. The most recent one started when we moved to Scotland. That’s the one I’m going to talk about. I didn’t really want to go there in the first place. When Eric decided to include the UK in his academic job search, as his postdoc appointment was coming to...

[Revised version of previous essay. I am leaving the first version up for comparison.] This morning I got up and stepped on the scale, the way I usually do on Saturdays, the way I’m supposed to every weekend for the medical research study that my son and I are currently participating in. The blue digital numbers flashed 140.2. Unacceptable. 139.9 is the absolute upper barrier of what my mind will tolerate these days without panic. I took off my fuzzy, long-sleeved pajama top, used the toilet, and got back on the scale. Now the answer was 139.3. Still high, but within permissible bounds. (There is, of course, no lower limit established on ‘permissible.’ 134.9 is the lowest figure I’ve ever recorded, so that’s what I think of as the bottom of the range.) I exhaled and promised myself to stay away from snacks for the next few days. I went downstairs to empty the dishwasher and get my gym bag together for 8 a.m. Zumba. As I put the dishes away, I focused on positive, calming tho...

[Composed 1/5/19] This morning I got up and stepped on the scale, the way I usually do on Saturdays, the way I’m supposed to every weekend for the UCSD medical research study that my son and I are currently participating in. The blue digital numbers flashed 140.2. Unacceptable. 139.9 is the absolute upper barrier of what my mind will tolerate these days without panic. I took off my fuzzy, long-sleeved pajama top, used the toilet, and got back on the scale. Now the answer was 139.3. Still high, but within permissible bounds. (There is, of course, no lower limit established on ‘permissible.’ 134.9 is the lowest figure I’ve ever recorded, so that’s what I think of as the bottom of the range.) I exhaled and promised myself to stay away from snacks for the next few days. With luck, I thought, I might even reconfigure my usual fluctuation cycle so that I hit the high point on the weekend and the low point near Wednesdays, when we have the official weekly weigh-in for the research program...