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Three Stories About Poop
From an 1899 edition of The Emperor’s New Clothes, illustrated by Helen Stratton. Today, I take a turn from the sacred and beautiful (kd lang, Leonard Cohen, Maya Lin, Pablo Neruda) to the profane and...
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Little Murders
I happened to mention to someone yesterday that I had written my previous post about dog poop, and that person exclaimed, “Oh, like Elliott Gould in Little Murders. He plays a photographer who has...
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Bloody Thursday
Bloody Thursday memorial at the ULWU office, Mason & Beach streets, San Francisco, 2009. Photo by Liz Allardyce. Today is the anniversary of Bloody Thursday, a dark day of San Francisco’s Maritime...
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Does It Matter Whether a Smile Is Real?
The relationship of our happiness to our willingness to fake it has been the topic of debate for a long time, and many a bromide supports the idea that it’s a good thing to fake it if need be....
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TEDTalks and Keys to Happiness
dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html I began my blog journey with a desire to understand my own reaction of irritation in the face of the “positive psychology” movement and to explore what motivates...
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What Do We Value?
Image of the U.S. pointing to Justice with Hope alongside, on the East Pediment of the U.S. Capitol Building. Original sculpted by Luigi Persico, 1825-1828, called Genius of America. I was thinking the...
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Laurel Nakadate’s 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears
An image from Laurel Nakadate’s 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears, 2011. A Joyous Crybaby reader out in California emailed me the other day and asked if I had ever heard of Laurel Nakadate. He said that...
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Self-Help
Snowflake obsidian, with its supposed healing powers. Even if for me those are symbolic, it soothes. Today, I want to offer my version of a self-help project. I had to laugh when this idea came to me...
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Kinds of Help
Last month, two graduate students that I work with invited me to speak at a round-table event about blogging later in November. I agreed, enthusiastically, put it on the calendar, and then promptly...
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Teachers and Students and Killers
Yesterday, a colleague of mine received a disturbing email from a man who had been urgently interested in enrolling in UCF’s MFA program. In her role as advisor to our current MFA students, she’d been...
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