Credit Where Credit is Due
To be fair, my creative writing students were much better on Wednesday than they were on Monday. I’d still complain that most of them haven’t really tried to apply the principles & ideas & techniques we’ve looked at in example texts & that we’ve discussed in workshop to their own writing. A few have begun [...]
Wit
I know there is a large literature on wit, but while writing the previous post it struck me that we use the term to name two essential things: 1) Basic smarts, the ability to have your wits about you; 2) the ability to use language against itself in order to stand against conventional wisdom. So [...]
Bright Future in Sales, Yeah Yeah
I’ve been teaching a long time, but I have seldom had a class as dispiriting as my current Introduction to Creative Writing. It is the end of the semester & they are still unable to eliminate or transform clichés in their own work or identify them in the work of others. They are for the [...]
Jihadis from Morocco
There is a remarkable essay by Andrea Elliott in the NY Times Magazine about a group of boys who grew up in Tetouan Morocco & became jihadis in Spain & Iraq. Though it was many years ago, I traveled through Tetouan & then further south in Morocco. Perhaps that is why I found the accounts [...]
Thanksgiving at Melissa’s
Carole & I usually go to Ottawa to one of our favorite restaurants on Thanksgiving. Yes, there is a bit of irony, which we cultivate, surrounding leaving the US to celebrate a US holiday. I have no family I’d much want to associate with in any case & Carole’s family members live on the West [...]
Democracy by Death Squad
Private security companies “have been shooting a lot of people” in Iraq. What’s surprising — though hopeful — is that a prosecutor cares enough to bring cases before a grand jury. How are these groups different from the death squads in Latin America in the 1980s & 1990s? Extra-military, heavily armed political muscle will inevitable [...]
VN Food with Amy
Last night our friend Amy came over & we made Indian food, but last week I cooked Vietnamese: Spring rolls and a crab & noodle salad. Here is picture of my plate of the Vietnamese food. (I think we got some of the Indian dishes we had last night & I’ll post those later.)
I’ve [...]
Goodbye to All That
I have been guilty of a certain utopianism when it comes to life on line. For a while I even believed in the idea that we could have “open discussions” about politics on line. IHE’s discussions disabused me of that idea right quick, though I should have seen it years earlier — sometimes I’m witlessly [...]
Throwing Newsweek Away
I got a subscription to Newsweek as an automatic premium when I contributed to my local public radio station. It has been going straight from my post office box to the trash for two years now, so I am way ahead of the game.
Breaking a Bad Habit
For the last year or so I have been reading the Inside Higher Ed website & contributing occasionally to the discussions, but I’m going to have to stop. Not just stop posting in the forums, but stop reading. It’s sad but necessary, like leaving behind a bar you once loved because it has been taken [...]
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