IDÉE FIXE
An idea or desire that dominates the mind; an obsession
For this series, Department of English faculty and staff are invited to share their obsessions — from tap dancing to fungi to ice cream to opera to vermin. What follows is a collection of lusciously-written odes: invitations down the rabbit hole.
2020
JANUARY 14 | Elizabeth Weiser on Close-to-the Ground Travel
The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, whose Gitanjali I read obsessively in Kolkata, wrote that “the traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own.” Traveling alone can be terrifying to contemplate from our living room, where we feel safe and in control, because we must throw ourselves on the mercy of the world.
2019
JANUARY 8 | Marcus Jackson on Cooking and Eating
My cooking and food obsession began in elementary school, the late 1980s, my mom sacrificing an extra 90 cents of the grocery budget so I could get Totino’s frozen pizza instead of the inferior Kroger version.
FEBRUARY 25 | Hannibal Hamlin on Music
I remember hearing Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Vespers sung by the Czech Philharmonic Choir in the immense Orthodox Cathedral of the Transfiguration near Markham Ontario. The church was the pet project of a Uranium mining millionaire who also raised cattle. It looms over 200 feet into the sky in the middle of nowhere.
MARCH 25 | Merrill Kaplan on Icelandic
The sounds of Icelandic are also delightful. They are the sounds of cats: purring, meowing, trilling. The r is emphatically trilled, like in Spanish. The intervocalic g is softer than German ch and not so garglingly far back in the throat, more like the hiss of a cat that wasn’t so annoyed after all.
APRIL 29 | Elizabeth Hewitt on Stalking the Wild Amanita
As is so often the case, the Amanita Muscaria was the most gorgeous and alluring of objects as well as the most dangerous. It is also not especially rare and so I would occasionally discover it on my walks, and I would perambulate in ever widening concentric circles around the mushroom considering where its poison might have spread.
SEPTEMBER 23 | Jacob Risinger on Ice Cream
My vast enthusiasm for ice cream played at least a small part in my decision to go to college in Vermont, a state where the cow-to-human ratio is about 1 to 3.
OCTOBER 14 | James Phelan on Basketball
When I came to Ohio State, I realized that my senior male colleagues expected me to lead the Department team—Ezra's Pounders!—to the intramural title. Fortunately, that was an expectation I could meet.
NOVEMBER 15 | Jared Gardner on Tattoos
With my fear of the tattoo gun no longer an obstacle, I realized that a tattoo might be just the thing to make me feel better about inhabiting a body that was increasingly a source of pain and frustration.
DECEMBER 30 | Matthew Cariello on The Catcher in the Rye
At that point, the book exploded on the page in my mind. Every sentence began to burn with a preternatural awareness of the human condition. Allie’s death was everyone’s death, and Holden’s life was everyone’s life. His obsession with the ducks isn’t really about the ducks (which, by the way, don’t go anywhere in the winter), but about loss.