Four years ago today, I left my hotel in Overton, Nevada and drove south on I-15 toward LA. By the time I hit the California state line, I was seriously close to running out of gas. On a wing and a prayer I made it to the gas station in Cima. I know this route on I-15 now like the…
Author Archive for alirachelpearl
Ali Rachel Pearl is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Southern California where she writes and teaches about Los Angeles, the desert, archival practices, race, intersectionality, and digital media. Her prose, book reviews, photos, digital experiments, and other works appear in Hyperrhiz, Hobart, Redivider, DIAGRAM, The New York Times, Pilot Light, and elsewhere. Most of the year she lives and teaches in Los Angeles where she also pursues her obsessions with street art, amateur photography, music, psychogeography, modern & contemporary art, performance, the desert, the desert, the desert, and repetition.
The End of Being 27
This week I turn 28 years old, but I’m not quite ready to let go of 27 yet. 27 has always been my favorite number, and I had a feeling for a long time that my 27th year would be an important one. Indeed, that has turned out to be true in ways I could never have imagined. I turned…
/You wanna light it now, the candle from both ends/
This song came on while I was eating by myself at a restaurant up the street from my house earlier today. I was reading Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and it struck me that I have the opposite sentiment in my heart right now. I miss being lonely. I am having an instinct to narrativize here that I…
The Beginning is Near
It’s been awhile. I think this is because I was sad for a few months. It is much harder for me to write when I am sad. I’m not even entirely sure what I’ve been doing with my time. Where it’s gone. What hole it slipped into and never came out of. A friend of mine often makes jokes about…
March Sadness
I was watching The Walking Dead this evening, and at the end of a particularly heart wrenching scene there was this sad, haunting song. I looked it up and it’s Nicole Dollanganger’s “Chapel.” I’ve never heard of this person or this song, but as I started tearing up, I began to think more extensively about music and sadness. I met…
Bipolar II & Never Fitting a Narrative
I was speaking with my therapist of five years earlier this week and she finally put a name to a pattern of behavior I’ve experienced for as long as I can remember. I asked her what it meant to be bipolar II, and felt for a moment like I was being diagnosed with something, a sickness. But I quickly remembered…
Self-Portrait as Library (Redux)
I was in Skylight Books today, which is often a place I visit when I’m particularly restless or needing to fulfill an urge I can usually only satiate with something destructive like alcohol, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember the name of the book I was looking for. I’d actually gone there to buy Adrienne Rich’s Diving Into…
The End of the Beginning of the Year
I think what I’m trying to do is get away with something. Or a lot of somethings. One of those things I’m trying to get away with is writing a book that is not so long and not so focused, but that meanders through the desert, or through the many deserts I’ve inhabited. All the words I use right now…
Los Angepocalypse
Many of you have asked for the syllabus from my Los Angeles apocalypse course that I’m teaching this spring, so I’m just gonna give you the course description and course readings below. Last year I taught a course about violence in the deserts of the American west and I was far more prepared for that course because I’d just completed…
How That One Family’s Christmas Card is Killing Us
About an hour ago, my mom and I got in a fight about something she said to me that hurt my feelings. She didn’t mean to hurt my feelings. She was making an observation. I snapped back at her and she told me to stop being mean. I explained that I wasn’t trying to be mean, but that I hoped…