Teaching with Pixels: First Podcast
Thanks to Pam’s comment on the previous post, I decided to get serious about creating audio files for my students. The only problem I had was figuring out how to get the LAME encoder to work with Audacity, but after solving that, I was able to record a brief story for my students. It was [...]
Teaching with Pixels: A Free Form Meditation
The second week (of eight) of my online course begins today. Things are going well both logistically and in terms of learning, I think. My own learning especially. There are fifteen students, though it looks like one may drop, & that feels like a good number for this sort of course online. When I teach [...]
What We Allow
Began reading Richard Powers’ Operation Wandering Soul, finding the style a little excessive, a little faux-Pynchon & tedious, overwrought. And yet, I also feel a sense of regard for an artist letting it fly, rolling it out, playing language like a cheap guitar. And, self-consciously, I can’t help wondering as I read where my own [...]
John Banville’s Kepler
Just finished reading John Banville’s novel Kepler. I’ve had it lying around since sometime in the 1990s, when I bought it along with its companion Copernicus. I remember racing through Doctor Copernicus, but putting Kepler down after fifty pages. I picked it up again because I have been (vaguely) thinking about texts for my Imagining [...]
Parataxis as Praxis
Does parataxis exist in a text if the whole text’s tactic is paratactic? Doesn’t parataxis depend on a context of syntaxis? Is the wholly paratactic poem poem possible & if it is, what is its context? The whole language? Those questions occurred to me while reading the most recent of Ray Davis’s accounts of his [...]
Happy Talk
For those of us who lived through the Vietnam War, this piece in the Washington Post is full of strange echoes & the sound of machinery clanging in the background as the sets are changed. It is full of the same kinds of assertions spoken by the same kinds of politicians & generals using the [...]
Safety & the Imagination
There is a very good article by Elizabeth Redden at Inside Higher Ed yesterday on the threat of violence in creative writing classrooms. At about the same time as the Virginia Tech massacre, there was an incident (that did not eventuate in violence) at San Jose State. An instructor there, after reading a disturbing story [...]
Understanding Vietnam (Online Version)
The website for my online version of Understanding Vietnam went live today. I asked each student to post something about themselves in the discussion forum. This is what I wrote to get the discussion started:
I first got interested in Vietnam in 1968 when I had to sign up with the Selective Service & became eligible [...]
Poetry as a Silver Tea Service
Via Silliman’s Blog, this piece about the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard & its curator, who is moving to Chicago to take over as editor of Poetry. Do I dare to eat a peach?
Problems in Epistemology
The NY Times has an article this morning about the second Republican presidential debate. Or scary clown show.
The scenario presented to the 10 Republican presidential candidates was chilling: Three American shopping malls had been bombed, producing scores of casualties. Terrorists with detailed knowledge of another imminent and deadlier attack had been captured and taken [...]
