There was a time in my life that I wanted to be an essayist. It started in college, when I discovered that E.B. White was a writer’s writer, and had done much more with his life beyond Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web (though now knowing that he did write those children’s books makes him all the more endearing). I devoured his painstakingly perfect essays in Here is New York, one of the most erudite and graceful books on the city that’s ever been written. I remember reading this exquisite paragraph in the wake of 9/11 and thinking how it seemed to encapsulate the terror and fear and fragility of a place and a time, despite having been written 50 years before the events took place:

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sounds of the jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

I came to realize that the life of an essayist is fairly impossible in this day and age (what, no one will pay me to sit in my room and muse on topics of my own making?), and turned to journalism instead (a far more lucrative venture). But when I was asked by Carlo Rotella, my fabulous American Studies professor in college, to contribute an essay to the literary magazine Post Road, I leapt at the chance. I’d been taking a storytelling class at the time, which had me flexing my nonfiction muscles, and I ended up taking the opportunity to put the same story I had been working on telling aloud down on paper. So I submitted a piece on my time at the Office of Public Security, which was my first real job out of college. It was around before the Department of Homeland Security was created, and suffice it to say that its role as a government office was primarily to calm the public’s psyche. And despite my earnest desire to help with counter-terrorism, I quickly became disillusioned with the entire effort. It was a long two years.

I don’t think I had White in my mind when I decided to write about my security job, but it’s funny now to realize his imprint on my subconscious. It was only when I got a copy of the magazine and recalled my essayist intentions that the two aligned in my head. And I’m glad they did.

I need to go and read some more White.

[Post Road]

I used to love the idea of hiding stuff when I was a kid, an always kinda wanted those shaving cream cans with the unscrewable bottoms where you could keep stuff safe. Along those same lines, I loved fake books where you could hide your secrets, and have contemplated making myself one, just for fun. But these Book Clutch handbags from Kate Spade are way more stylish and cool. Plus you can download the artwork that appears on their covers, which was based on original book designs from Penguin. Fun!

I’ve already mentioned my obsession with the old trolley tickets that were issued weekly in D.C. during the 1930s-50s. (We used one of the designs for our Save the Date card for our wedding.) But I adore the ones issued during the cherry blossom season in the 1930s. And since I’m gearing up for the Cherry Blossom run and the trees are starting to bloom in the city (hooray spring!), I thought I’d gather a sampling of them here. Aren’t they gorgeous?

You can find hundreds of old tickets online at Richard Cook’s fabulous Glen Echo/Cabin John history page.

Current obsession: My wonderful brother, in his effort to help me design some of my wedding stationary, uncovered a digital treasure trove of old Capital Transit passes. Each pass was issued weekly, and used to ride the trolleys that traveled through D.C. in the 1930s through the 50s. And they’re all fabulously unique. Here are a few from Glen Echo Park, where we’re going to be getting hitched next summer (and one from Christmas, because, hey, it’s that time of year). Aren’t they just the coolest?

Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, and now John Hughes. Today is a dark day for the brat pack. One only hopes he lived up to the immortal words of his own Ferris Bueller:

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

I went to the press preview for the William Eggleston exhibit at the Corcoran gallery last week (gorgeous — read Krista’s fab review of it here) and tucked into the press materials was a short intro to this new exhibit, “Neighborhood Watch,” by Corcoran art professor Claudia Smigrod. Smigrod raised her children in Alexandria in the early eighties, and, being a photographer, spent her time shooting portraits of her children and their neighborhood friends. Twenty years later, she decided to revisit these pictures and photograph the children again — this time, grown up. The result is a stirring series of portraits that are both introspective and captivating. Many of the images ran in the Washington Post Magazine this past weekend, and all of them are fascinating. Each person speaks of what they believed in then, and where their head is now. It’s a simple but brilliant exercise, and I can’t help we’d all be a bit better off if someone took the time to stop, take our picture, and ask us where we came from.

The exhibit will be on view in the Corcoran Corridor, Corcoran Gallery of Art, from July 1 to Aug. 9. Take advantage of the free Saturdays and check it out.

I was interested to read this piece about Jodi Picoult in the New York Times Magazine this past weekend for a few reasons. The foremost: Damnit! I interviewed her years ago and now there’s an major feature about her and her upcoming feature film. The second, and actual reason, was it was interesting to read a profile of someone you’ve met fairly early on in their relative fame (when I interviewed her, back in 2002, she had not yet had a novel hit the New York Times best-seller list, and in fact, she chided Jonathan Franzen for rejecting the magic touch of the Oprah’s Book Club selection). Then of course, there was Gina Bellafante’s discussion of the nature of her novels and the genre of “children in peril” literature that’s become her shtick. I’m apt to agree with some of the commenters on Jezebel who point out that not all of her novels actually deal with children, and remember speaking with her about how she chose her subjects. At the time, she’d just come out with her latest novel, which dealt with the sexual abuse of a child by a priest. Surprisingly, given the fact that she was from New England, she actually began working on the book before the crisis in the church broke out.

Slate’s XX Factor interprets the piece as a statement about our ambivalence towards motherhood and marriage, which seems to be to be a bit of overexertion of an arguement. And a NYTimes mommy blogger talks about her own worries as parent, and how imagining the worst has become “almost a talisman now, a ritual that reminds me how fragile the moment, and how much to savor the now.”

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I completely blame Steve Inskeep and NPR for my current obsession with Elvis Perkins. Ever since I heard this interview with Perkins during their coverage of SXSW, I’ve been listening to his new album, Elvis Perkins in Dearland nonstop. In recent conversations, his name keeps coming up, and I’ve found a few others mildly obsessed with him as well (about half of the people I know who went to Brown knew Perkins when he was there, and each has a distinct memory of him). Steve Inskeep, your influence knows no bounds.

But complicating Perkins’ twisted, dirge-like lyrics and soulful voice even further is his backstory, which is heartbreaking: His father, actor Anthony Perkins (of Psycho fame) died of AIDS when he was in his teens; his mother, Berry Berenson-Perkins — a photographer — was aboard one of the planes that struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. “The songs are their grandchildren they didn’t get to meet,” Perkins told Inskeep. “They strike me as offspring from time to time, and some of them on the new album sort of stare back at me a little funny.”

Perkins plays Iota in Arlington on May 19.

I just mailed out a half dozen Valentines this week in my attempt to keep the post office afloat, but then I found these lovely Valentine’s Day postcards on the Kate Spade website. Send one to your sweetie… or the favorite ‘stach in your life.

All of the talk about the economy tanking is depressing, so I prefer to look at greatness instead. One of the most fantastic things to come out of the first Great Depression (as Jon Stewart likes to call it) were the Works Progress Administration (WPA) posters that were designed to keep the public’s spirits high in the midst of our country’s lowest depths. Roosevelt created the posters through the Federal Art Project, and ReadyMade magazine did a fantastic tribute to them in their Dec./Jan. issue, asking contemporary artists to create their own posters based on the original designs.

From the magazine:

American art has never been so liberally supported by government as it was during the critical years between 1933 and 1943. The FAP served a dual purpose: It gave unemployed artists work while demonstratively branding the virtues of the nation through rousing mass communication. The WPA Poster Division was mandated to promote the cultural and social programs that FDR’s administration took great pains to foster. The posters supported hygiene, education, sports, vacations, conservation, community, theater, dance, and music; they cautioned about workplace safety and venereal disease.

…

WPA artists turned to an early form of universal symbolism that involved a streamlined variant of artmoderne (or art deco), a hint of Russian constructivism, a smattering of cubism, and a dose of surrealism that gave the posters the aura of timely modernity.

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