I Am Going to Run for President . . .
. . . but I’m not going to tell you what my policies will be if I’m elected. I promise to be nice, though.
A Hundred Bluejays
Carole & I were standing out on the deck a couple of evenings ago. The deck faces the river, though the water is mostly screened by trees. We’re deep in the woods here, so we have lots of birds & the jays have been active lately, calling & rattling around in the trees, but [...]
Alice in Wonderland
I’m rereading Alice this week because I’m going to teach it in my first-year course this semester. What has struck me on this reading is not just the irrationality of the adult world from Alice’s point of view, but its stupidity & ugliness. The main themes of the course are childhood & adulthood, chaos & [...]
Liam Rector (1949 - 2007)
I knew Liam a little when I was on the board of the Associated Writing Programs. Liam’s political instincts were always on the side of freedom & imagination. He was a lovely man. His suicide comes as a shock, though he had stoically endured poor health for many years. I also knew Tree Swenson through [...]
Loon & Chikadees
I noticed yesterday that the chickadees have come down from the higher mountains. Saw them nosing around the empty feeders. And this morning early we heard a loon fly over, laughing. A cool wind out of the north. Fall.
New Computer
My university has given me a new laptop, with which I am writing this post. All faculty get a new machine every third year & it was my year for an upgrade, but most faculty just get a new desktop unit plunked in their office. Because I have been working to use online resources in [...]
Nostalgia for Neo-Liberal Technocracy
I pulled Pierre Bourdieu’s slim book of essays, Acts of Resistance, off the shelf in my office the other day to check a quotation I thought I might use. Actually, I had the wrong book, but I left Acts sitting on my desk until yesterday when I picked it up to put it back on [...]
Coyote
Saw one of these skulking around the trees at the edge of our backyard the night before last. Skinny & long-legged, I thought it was a fawn at first, then a fox, but it is what they call around here a coy dog. What I grew up calling a coyote. Didn’t see him last night, [...]
On Being an Academic Generalist
As academics go, I am about as much a generalist as it is possible to be. First, I am in the Humanities, which unlike science are generalist by tradition; second I am a poet. Both these identifications mean that I can legitimately be interested in anything. I might be able to claim a specialist’s competence [...]
Contingency
The previous post may have been somewhat elliptical. I was trying to dra a distinction between systems of certainty & systems of contingency. Science & the arts are systems of contingency (though they have deep epistemological differences, whereas fundamentalist religions & conspiracy theories are systems of certainty. Systems of certainty are, by both definition & [...]
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