From the top, I apologize for the extreme lateness of my posting.  It seems, though, that every time I’ve sat down to write, I’ve done my usual procrastinating-web search to glance through the usual places in search of interesting diversions to read and, surprise surprise, everywhere I look is a story of the apocalypse.  I wanted to only write about The Albertine Notes, but then I recalled a line from very early in the text, when the narrator first meets Cassandra: “I’d had enough with the Hasidim and the Baptists and their rants about end-times [emphasis original].  The problem was that Albertine, bitch goddess, kept giving conflicting reports about which end-times we were going to get,” (143). Continue reading →

I have been looking forward to The Road for some time not so much for the novel itself, I’ll confess, but so that after I read the book, I can watch the film, and then see all the local places I grew up around, with Viggo Mortensen pushing a cart and wielding a gun through them.  As a Pittsburgher, you are, in some sense, innately in touch with the apocalyptic, or perhaps post-apocalyptic.  Pittsburgh is a place where, between 1980 and 1984 alone, 50,000 steelworkers lost their jobs, as the economy hemorrhaged and the region seemed doomed.  Today, in most ways, the economy has recovered quite well, with the region as a whole experiencing an unemployment rate below the national average.  Yet feelings of impending doom are embedded in the Pittsburgh psyche, and much of this is due to the scars of decades of heavy industry followed by a total collapse of that.   Continue reading →