Skinflints
Because I blog under my own name rather than anonymously, I take care what I say about my colleagues. But this is egregious. Our department secretary organized a cash going away gift for our work-study student, who is graduating. This is the student person who has happily done our scut-work for three years with a [...]
Perspective
Here is another one of those putting-it-into-perspective observations, this one from Fred Clark at Slacktivist regarding the expenditure of funds from the Department of Homeland Security. If you’re a small-town mayor or police chief who knows how to game the system you can get the federal government to give you all kinds of toys for [...]
Crazy
Writing about politics sends me into a spiral of despair so I have mostly been avoiding doing so lately, but I still read the political blogs obsessively. And lately I’ve been wondering about my fellow citizens who still support the war in Iraq. What are they thinking? I ask myself. This, at Hullabaloo, puts things [...]
Guns
This is an important story. The NRA prefers terrorism to background checks.
Nasty, Brutish & Long
James Hynes’ The Lecturer’s Tale is one of the nastiest & meanest books I have read in a long time, though it is well-plotted & tells a kind of low truth about academia. Or about a certain elite segment of academia. Every character in this 388 page novel is at least unpleasant (including children) but [...]
Semester Retrospective
I didn’t cover myself in glory. But then I didn’t crash & burn, either. At the moment, I don’t have much time for retrospective self-analysis because I’m getting ready to teach an on-line version of my regular Understanding Vietnam course & that means wrestling with the Blackboard “learning system.” That course goes live in about [...]
Ashbery
I respond to John Ashbery’s poetry the way I respond to Alexander Pope’s. I recognize the genius, but after a hundred lines I simply can’t go on. This is a response experienced over thirty years of reading. With the exception of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror — the short comic poems more than the title [...]
New Poem
I have a recent poem in the online journal Babel. Anger & despair about the Iraq War in response to a call for poems about Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” Babel is sponsored by ICORN, an organization that provides refuge for writers whose work puts them in political danger of their lives. Ironically, I am [...]
Tired & Stupid
I’ve just finished grading essays & final projects for 125 students. I feel tired & stupid. I wrote the beginning of a post about grading, but it just seemed garrulous & tedious. When I finished grading this afternoon I went out & worked in the yard a bit. First day this spring above 70. Pulling [...]
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