This afternoon my parents, my aunt, and I took a little road trip down scenic 280 to Stanford, where the weather was warm and breezy. We picnicked in the Rodin Sculpture Garden, strolled through the Quad and Mem Chu (“mem choo”), and made our way to the bookstore. [Before college, I’d heard about the over-abbreviated Stanford lingo and thought it was a cheesy PR gimmick, but as a freshman I was surprised to find that everyone actually does say things like “the Co Ho” (the Coffee House), “Mem Chu” (Memorial Church), and “Pro Fro” (prospective frosh), etc.] Anyway. Today at the bookstore–no, not the “Bo Sto”; that would just be silly–I picked up a couple of t-shirts, and consistent with my inability to say no to drastically reduced-price books, I bought:
- The Erotic Whitman, Vivian R. Pollak
- The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence, David Remnick, ed.
- Queer Burroughs, Jamie Russell
2 replies on “Back to the Farm”
I’m not so sure I even want to know what “The Erotic Whitman” is…
Heh. Now, now. It’s all very scholarly. From the book jacket: Author “Vivian Pollak skillfully explores the intimate relationships that contributed to Walt Whitman’s imagination of masculinity in crisis… Drawing on his early fiction, journalism, letters, and notebook entries, she shows how in spite of his personal ambivalence about sustained erotic intimacy, Whitman came to imagine himself as ‘the phallic choice of America.'”
Umm. Okay, so maybe that last bit doesn’t sound so scholarly. 😉