William R. Handley

Marriage, violence, and the nation in the American literary West

Introduction 1. Western unions 2. Turners rhetorical frontier 3. Marrying for race and nation: Wisters omniscience and omissions 4. Polygamy and empire: Greys distinctions 5. Unwedded West: Cathers divides 6. Accident and destiny: Fitzgeralds fantastic geography 7. Promises and betrayals: Joan Didion and Wallace Stegner Afterword Notes Index.

Belonging(s): Plural Marriage, Gay Marriage and the Subversion of "Good Order"

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch told the Senate on Monday that same-sex couples should be able to live together like married people, should have insurance and estate benefits like married people, and should be able to visit and care for each other in hospitals like married people. But Hatch, R-Utah, said he draws the line at actually declaring them married. ‘‘We ought to be able to solve those inadequacies in the law without changing a 5,000-year-plus definition of marriage,’’ Hatch said.

Freeways in the City of Angels

This essay explores texts and images through which the territory and experience of the Los Angeles freeway circulate. Representations of the freeway in fiction, non-fiction, painting, photography, and film register a wide range of themes and affects. The freeway seems to offer freedom but demands subjection; it provokes both fear and desire. It is a site where revelations and communion are possible and forgetting and numbing are made easy; a liminal space between public and private, mobility and paralysis, past and future, point A and point B. Offering a greater convergence of people than shopping malls do, it can yet be one of the most rivate and isolating experiences in one’s day. Its signs are more determinative than advertising and “must be obeyed because they are infallible.”1 (In Steve Martin’s film L. A. Story, one even passes on romantic advice.) The freeway is in place (except during some earthquakes), but no place in any social sense. The most shared pragmatic structure in the city, the freeway and its interchanges have been called works of art and rendered as such, often suggesting a post-human landscape, as in the photography of atherine Opie, who depicts the freeway devoid of even cars, and in the paintings of James Doolin, whose “Twilight” (see figure 1), a Los Angelean version of the Sublime, both diminishes the human and elevates the eye above the city’s most recent, extravagant, and elevated freeway interchange, that of the Harbor and the Imperial.