Zoë Stagg

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“All by way of saying, that if there ever came a time when the government of my new homeland was actually calling up the forty-something asking-and-telling homosexuals with hypo-active thyroids to take up arms, something very calamitous indeed will have to have happened.”

David Rakoff, “Love It Or Leave It” from Don’t Get Too Comfortable.

It’s his essay on becoming a US citizen, and explains “Grass soup.” If it comes to eating grass soup, you’ve probably already got worse problems. I read this in ‘08 or ‘09, and with a few adjustments to details, thought it exactly described how useful I would be to a fighting force.

And then I joined the Army and David Rakoff died.  Damn.

“So that’s why I answered “yes.” But, like I said, it is grass soup. (I hope.)

David Rakoff Wins American Humor Prize...»

What’s cool about this, (other than I love his writing and he deserves it — he’s made me actually laugh and that’s a tall order) is that he’s a Canadian who became an American citizen this century.

His essay about becoming a citizen is in his book Don’t Get Too Comfortable. I think it was Sarah Vowell who went with him to watch, though I don’t remember if he explicitly says.

“Even though I am not a Muslim and I come from a country that enjoys cordial relations with the United States, I no longer felt safe being here as just a lawful permanent resident.”

He also talks about how although he pledged to take up arms to defend the country, if it came to that, to choosing him? We would probably be in the most dire of grass-soup eating straits.

Huh. I can think of someone else who once thought that…

B&W / Read All Over…

Squirreled away at training for most of 2010, I have a hole in my experience of popular culture—kind of like the year we lived in England left a 1987-sized gap that seems mostly My-Two-Dads in nature.

I missed out on a lot. I did not see the A-Team reboot in theaters. I didn’t see the LOST finale with the rest of the world. And I didn’t know that one of my favorite writers had a new book out.



Despite my wild digging of him, David Rakoff has never made my Klosterman Index—and I just figured out why. There are writers I love, who I don’t read. Not with my eyes, anyway. He is one of the writers who I will only consume if they’re reading their words to me themselves.

It’s not read-cheating by audiobook. (Nicholas Sparks, however, would be.) No, in this group, it’s as if their creations demand their own cadence in order to be consumed, the stress intended added quite deliberately and accurately by their own performance. 

Chuck Klosterman is usually one of these, though not entirely as strictly. Sarah Vowell is another. David Sedaris for sure. And David Rakoff is the King of the List. I own everything he’s written. And not a single page of it. So without visual reference,  he slipped my mind during the last ranking of the Index.

I will withhold my own review until I’m done listening, but I’m four months behind. When it dropped, the New York Times reviewer tucked this notion in the middle of his piece on it, “You wonder how many of these selections would be better said than read.”

Well, duh. Of course you do. “Reading Rakoff”: UR DOIN IT WRONG.