Cultural Immersion
I’ve mentioned before that I spent the summer reading half a dozen Patrick O’Brian sea novels. Set in the early 19th century, the stories feature a pair of friends — sort of Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson with their power relations reversed — Captain Jack Aubrey & Dr. Stephen Maturin, who sail around the world [...]
Cornel West on Democracy
Via Wood s Lot, here is a link to an essay, “Democracy Matters,” by Cornel West:
Meanwhile the market-driven media—fueled by our vast [...]
Impressed
I just had the first substantive discussions with the first-year students in my Clarkson Seminar class. (This is what we call “Freshman English” at Clarkson, though it is taught by people from across the Humanities & Social Sciences.) I am happy & impressed. The theme of this course, as I noted in a previous post, [...]
Military Justice . . .
. . . is to justice as military music is to music. Though many people have claimed their non-existence, I have seen the shadows of Vietnam flicker through the Iraq war from the start. Now we see the moral darkness of My Lai replayed at Haditha & in its aftermath.
Jonathan Miller’s Alice
Because I am teaching Alice in Wonderland this semester, I ordered Miller’s 1966 production, which includes turns by Peter Sellers, Sir John Gielgud, & Sir Michael Redgrave, though the most valuable minutes on the disk — certainly from a film history perspective — may be Cecil Hepworth’s 1903 silent film of the story. Miller’s [...]
First Classes of the Year
I’ve met my students for the new semester & enjoyed my initial interactions with them. I’m looking forward to the semester. It’s funny, when I redesigned the blog & swore off political rants (almost successfully), I thought I would write a lot more about teaching that I have wound up doing. There is the obvious [...]
Poverty is Just So . . . Inspiring
Just look at what those brown people down in Texas have managed to do. Why, it’s the American dream. Well, actually, it’s a shantytown with little infrastructure & virtually no social services, though to hear the Times reporter tell it you would think it was a shining city on a hill. Those Texas pols deserve [...]
Foucault’s Anti-Romantic Politics
Foucault Blog has a useful post detailing a particular right-wing attack (by David Frum) on Foucault, but which is also useful as an entry point for understanding the philosopher’s politics of doubt.
Schools of American Poetry
As taxonomies of American poetry go, this brief one by Jonathan Mayhew is more rewarding than most. I am much more sympathetic to the Confessional poets than most of my contemporaries. Writers like Berryman & Plath & to a lesser extent Lowell took the New Critical poetic conventions & at their best transformed them into [...]
Summer’s End
Hot today. Went to an orientation meeting with our new students this morning, then came home & finished reading the last (for now) of my Patrick O’Brian novels, which have been this summer’s addiction. I didn’t do much writing this summer, but I finished up several projects around the house — finally got the new [...]
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