Rodney King RIP

I first showed up in America for a conference at CUNY that coincided with the start of the LA riots that erupted when the LAPD officers were acquitted for being Rodney King.

There was a march for Rodney King in downtown Mamhattan where I remember eating my first improbably immense (I love that word now) slice of pizza with broccoli on it.

So it's strange to wake up (20 minutes ago) to the fact that Rodney King just died 20 years later, almost exactly.

And I mean strange in that Wordsworthian sense of a spot of time--a feeling of trauma around which meanings are secreted but never quite enough.