I’m writing this on a layover delay in DFW, an airport I’ve spent a lot of time in these last couple of years, where I’m staring in consternation at a big red sign outside a TGI Fridays that says it was recently voted the #1 airport bar in the country.

I have many questions. Did these people go to any other bars at DFW? (As a veteran of DFW airport bars, including the various Fridays, I wouldn’t place them in the top three.1) Was I there on an off night back in January, when I got that catastrophe of a Caesar salad?

Perhaps more salient: which TGI Fridays? I feel like I’ve been to seventeen different ones; at DFW, you can’t step into the same TGI Fridays twice. How many exist in this airport? The internet says there are somewhere between four and six. The Fridays website lists four, but Google Maps lists five, and neither includes the one in Terminal D that has seventy-three reviews.

The rankings, which were, strangely, done by a sports betting organization, don’t seem to specify which location is the best one. The link leads to terminal A, but that could just be by default—god only knows what chatbot compiled it. How do we really know which is the #1 airport bar in America?2 What if it was the mythical Terminal D? Are they all considered the same location? It seems notable that there is no plural for TGI Fridays.3

If you haven’t unsubscribed by now, I have the conference for you: NonfictioNow, the biennial conference for nonfiction writers/readers/professors, especially those with a more essayistic bent. That’s where I’m heading this time around. This year it’s in South Bend, where I’ll be attending and participating in a bunch of panels and events under the gaze of Touchdown Jesus, who presumably has more straightforward notions of truth than we do.

It remains to be seen whether I’ll manage to post this in time, but if anyone reading this is here, come to my panels on Friday about writing fiction and nonfiction and writing a second memoir, respectively. (Neither of which are things I’m really qualified to discuss, but that’s never stopped me before.)

It’s the last week of my academic year, I’m about to leave for a conference,4 and, for some stupid reason, I chose this week to move. Which explains both why this month’s dispatch is more than a week late, according to the schedule that exists only in my head, and why it may not be my finest work.

As I write this, I’m about to teach my last class of the year. That will mark my tenth year at my job, and twenty-first of teaching, overall. I don’t know what to do with those numbers.

This class I’m teaching that I wrote about two months ago turned out to be one of my favorites. It probably helps that I have a genuine interest in the topic—documentary film, prose, theory, and where they intersect—and that I was covering my favorite class from grad school, which was taught by my favorite professor. But one of the things I learned over all these years of teaching is that students, not teachers or texts, define and determine a class. I’ve frequently taught the exact same material, on the same day, to two different classes, and had them be completely different. Once every few years, you’ll get a group that, for whatever reasons—engagement, lots of repeat students, a willingness to read and talk—is exceptional. This was one of those classes.

It was my first time teaching this class, and a first class is like a first draft, so I wasn’t real familiar with all the texts, and I asked them to read and watch a lot of obscure and challenging stuff. Not all of it was successful—looking at you, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—but a lot of texts I thought might be too weird or difficult turned out to be class favorites. This is not a full reading and viewing list—I chose sections of many texts rather than the entirety of a few, an approach I was experimenting with and liked, for the most part. And I think any of the students in the class might make a different list. But my favorite texts of the class to teach were probably these:

Essays:

• Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

• Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton, “Exquisite Vessels” (The introduction to Shapes of Native Nonfiction.)

• William Rothman, “Eternal Verités” (This doesn’t seem to be online, but I found it in this old anthology I stumbled on in a Chicago used bookstore. It’s uneven, like any anthology, but better than most.)

• Werner Herzog’s essays/manifestos on ecstatic truth

• Joseph Harrington, “Docupoetry and Archive Desire”

Books:

• Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (always)

• John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

• Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (obligatory)

• Mark Nowak, Coal Mountain Elementary

Films:

• Dziga Vertov, Man With a Movie Camera

• Jennie Livingston, Paris is Burning

• RaMell Ross, Hale County This Morning, This Evening

• Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man (again—this is becoming an obsession)

As someone who is technically a working-class male writer,5 the recent Discourse on the subject of us occasioned by this piece has been reminding me of the last time we did this.

Any conversation around class in publishing is bound to be tedious and stupid and dishonest. For my part, I resolved long ago—around the time of Hillbilly Mania—never to engage in internet bullshit on the topic, and instead to write about class and masculinity like a real man: in books nobody wants to publish, much less read. But I did appreciate this response, by a writer I do not know, who points out much of the stupidity, and does so lucidly and well. 

Other than brief flirtations with their work as a young reader—mostly because it was constantly foisted upon me by the kind of people who think every Real Man needs to read them—I never liked most of the writers on that ridiculous list, particularly Hemingway. He strikes me, like Salinger and Vonnegut and others I’m forgetting at the moment, as the sort of writer who, if you’re no longer an undergraduate and call them a favorite, tells me you are not a serious person. Although what do I know; I also can’t stand Chekhov.6

And not for nothing, but Truman Capote had more insightful things to say about American masculinity than all of those people combined.

This has nothing to do with nonfiction or docs or what not, but I’m writing this on my first full day in my new place, which is also my old place. I’m moving back into the house I moved out of two years ago. I grew up in an itinerant family and have kept the tradition alive, so I’ve moved many times in my life—a few dozen?—but I’ve never moved back. It’s weird. My house smells like someone else.

In another week or two it’ll all be mundane: my kitchen’s cabinet logic, the places I park and watch and sleep, trash day. But I’m still in that weeklong moment after a move where anything seems possible in this new life.

For example, I might purchase an ottoman. Words I never thought I’d write, but here we are. When you grow up in a trailer, there are certain lines in the sand, and one of them is owning any furniture named after an empire. But all I have to sit on is a normal, non-sectional couch. My feet crave support. And a few years ago, I bought an overstuffed footstool sort of thing at the secondhand store across the highway, and it really tied the room together until my dog destroyed it.7

Buying a brand-new ottoman feels like a bridge too far, but I’m kicking the tires. One complicating factor is that my couch is coral. (It’s a long story, and it’s not pink, no matter what certain wiseacres might contend.) It’s hard to find a good ottoman. It’s harder to find one that goes with a coral couch.

I briefly considered cowhide, but that seemed like a little much, in more ways than one. I feel like an ottoman should be a little weird, in terms of texture or shape—a triangle is in contention, although so far that idea has not been widely embraced. My favorite 2000s pop singer has a few models of her own. I don’t like them, but they might be worth buying, if only to be able to say to visitors, “Why don’t you have a seat on that Kelly Clarkson ottoman?” Even this weird little creature is starting to grow on me.

If you’ve got ottoman thoughts, or a line on a nice one, let me know.

A few quick recommendations:

• I recently watched the 2022 HBO limited series Mind Over Murder, which is so much smarter than its insipid title would suggest. It’s directed by MacArthur Grant winner Nanfu Wang, whose talent is evident from the first few shots you see, and follows the bizarre story of the Beatrice Six, as well as the development of a play based on the real events that’s in the process of being staged in the town where they happened. Imagine Making a Murderer meets The Laramie Project, with an added wrinkle about false confessions—which, shameless plug, I’ve written about before. It’s one of the best true crime docs I’ve seen.

• This may be the most Boomer-dad thing I’ve ever said, but I’ve also been watching the new Kevin Costner-narrated The West, a documentary-ish series on The History Channel. I was expecting to hate-watch it, but instead I’m hooked. It has real historians, and a much more progressive perspective than I was expecting, all things considered. Although you do have to endure a lot of “digitally generated images,” corny reenactments, and the occasional shot of Costner squinting into the camera and struggling to pronounce words, not to mention the fact that watching too much of this show will make the algorithm start showing you commercials for windshield repair and moderate to severe ulcerative colitis.

• I listened to Cameron Winter’s album Heavy Metal last year when it came out, but only lately did I start getting really into it. He’s sort of like a Gen Z Lambchop on ketamine. This song is so good.

• I’ve recommended them here before, but I can’t stop watching Montessori Boy. I feel like I should be ashamed of this.

• It’s been about six years since a McSweeney’s humor piece really hit for me, and my favorite is older than some of my students, but this one took me back to the mid-oughts glory days of the form.