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It started in spring of 2012: I was commuting between the UWS and New Haven two days a week for my teaching postdoc at Yale. There was no balance between teaching, job applications, and raising a toddler. I was exhausted, “like a zombie” so watching a new show about zombies felt like just the thing to do on a train that moved me between two very different worlds.

It’s no exaggeration: The Walking Dead changed my life. That moment when Rick Grimes opens his eyes in a hospital, and turns his head to a vase of dead flowers by his bed, was revelation. In its modern usage, the word “apocalypse” has become synonomous with disaster and catastrophe, but in Greek, apokalyptein means to reveal, unveil, uncover. The show sparked anew a creative drive that I had lost in the last years of graduate school. I started writing poems again. Recently, I wrote a poem about those dead flowers.

For the latest installment of Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak explains the distinct brand of physical comedy practiced by Rowan Atkinson, best known for his character Mr. Bean. For my money, this scene of Mr. Bean running late for a dentist appointment is one of the funniest things ever put on screen.

This is the comedy of personality rather than the comedy of gags. It’s not about doing funny things. It’s about doing something quite normal in a funny way.

Atkinson himself explained and demonstrated the principles of physical comedy in a 60-minute documentary called Funny Business; here’s part 1:

“The Glass That Laughed”

Issue No. 289

I’m finally reading Barbara Browning’s new book The Gift (out in May), which is a memoir of sorts, that fluid sort-of-non-fiction-critical-theory-filled book that is my favorite to read. Browning is a dancer and teaches in the performance department of NYU and I loved her other two books, The Correspondence Artist and I Am Trying To Reach You.

What I love the most about Browning’s writing, and this comes through very clearly in The Gift, is the way she writes about the Internet. Not even writes, but uses it, if you choose to believe The Gift is non-fiction (the lines are blurred, as always characters are invented.) Aside from the fact that her books are populated with digital correspondence (marathon text message sessions are detailed, as are missed voicemails,) throughout The Gift Browning is interested in this idea of “inappropriate intimacy,” which manifests in various online and IRL encounters. She’ll see a fellow academic at a talk or reading and say offhand that they make a cameo in one of her books and later the reader learns said academic has, of course, since bought the book. A lot of The Gift concerns her ukelele covers, which she records on Photobooth and delivers to different people, including musician living in Berlin whom she begins a sort of erotic correspondence. Sometimes she chooses the songs, sometimes she asks for requests, sometimes she “gifts” personalized dances to people she meets over the Internet. 

I blogged not too long ago about how I craved a sort of irreverent intimacy in an age when the Internet has never felt more over-populated with noise. And surely inappropriate intimacy might be easily to facilitate on the Internet, where people so often fill in the blanks when it comes to vague interactions or “likes” or blog comments. But what Browning does is look at the crowded wallpaper of the Internet, all of its mundane comments or spam emails and its over-saturated Youtube cover market, and finds beauty in it. 

In one passage Browning is thinking of making “storage space in the hard drive of her brain” when she remembers an email from another Barbara, a “barbaraandersen64″ who accidentally emailed herself (without the 64, which is why it got sent to Browning) a draft meant for her daughter Meghan. “You will always have a space in my heart,” this Barbara wrote in an email that indicated a strained relationship. “Actually, if I were to write to her, I would suggest a minor edit,” Browning writes, funnily, as she flirts with the idea of e-mailing back. “I think space in my heart should really be a place, space sounds too much like cubic footage in a storage facility.” The book itself opens with a charming scene in which Browning emails back a “no-reply” spam email address for an Illinois psychiatrist specializing in weight loss. They begin a conversation after she signs the email “Love Barbara.” In another scene, during a class she’s teaching at the Free University, Browning’s students ask if it’s OK to stalk her on the internet. “Oh, by all means!” Browning replies. Something about that felt refreshing.

Ultimately, Browning’s work reads likes a snowglobe containing an intimate, curious Internet, one in which interactions with strangers are heartfelt and full of promise. It’s clear in The Gift, but also in her other books. In The Correspondence Artist Browning details an intensely passionate, email-based relationship with a paramour she describes as being four different, distinct characters of different ages, races, and genders, and include a novel prize winner, a popular musician, a poet, and a famous young artist. In I Am Trying To Reach You, her protagonist stumbles across a series of videos of a dancer and then falls into a internet k-hole that uncovers a conspiracy theory involving a bunch of celebrity deaths. The videos are of Browning, of course, and she actually uploaded all of them to Youtube for you to watch. 

In an interview with Emily Books, Browning talked about going down Internet rabbit holes:

“This is exactly what I mean about rabbit holes. I love them. I don’t find them a waste of time at all. The Internet works like the subconscious - I’m sure somebody’s said that already, it’s so obvious, I just can’t think who it would have been. The point is, this is how dreamwork works: you wake up and think, “Why the hell did I dream that my 2nd grade teacher was masturbating my dental hygienist?” If you were in analysis, you’d probably be able to figure it out if you really wanted to, just like you could probably eventually figure out why YouTube thinks some SpongeBob SquarePants video is related to Natalya Makarova dancing the dying swan. I do like to understand some of the connections, and for others to remain mysterious. This is how I feel about my subconscious as well. And I never really find it a waste of time. If you think about it, you always find something out.”

Lana Del Rey, Queen of Boredom

“People say ‘it’s boring’ — as if that were a final standard of appeal, and no work of art had the right to bore us,” Susan Sontag once wrote in her journals. A woman who is perpetually bored — with men, with love, and even with living — still has the power to provoke. And in the realm of pop, where women are supposed to delight us, entertain us, give us something to dream for, Lana resists.