An American Character
I read B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two when I was in high school & it chilled me to the bone. (Pretty sure I also read Naked Lunch that year.) It reminded me of my own fundamentalist milieu minus the religion. My step-father actually tried to use a Skinnerian device to educate me at one point. This [...]
Teaching Freshman Composition
William Major had a good column at Inside Higher Ed last week & surprisingly the comment thread generated by Major’s essay is intelligent & civil. (IHE has the most persistent anti-intellectual right-wing trolls on the internet — interesting as an anthropological study, but deeply dispiriting for regular reading.) Major’s main contention is that more full [...]
Kay Ryan
Just wanted to note that Kay Ryan has been on my radar for quite a while, though I’d known none of the details now coming out about her life now that she has been named poet laureate. As someone who teaches Freshman English every fall, I was particularly impressed by the fact that Ryan teaches [...]
Clients Can Be Sooo Inconvenient
Anyone who lived through the Vietnam war era in the US will feel a startling sense that history is cycling back over familiar ground when reading this NY Times piece about timetables for the withdrawal of American forces. The laughably transparent but straight-faced explanations of al-Malaki’s clear meaning reprise the greatest hits of [...]
Home
My month in paradise has come to an end & I have returned to . . . paradise. It is lovely to be home, though it’s going to take a while to get through the mail. I already feel a bit of nostalgia for BMC, but am also carrying forward certain consolidations in my work [...]
BMC: Finishing Up
I’ve been circumspect blogging about BMC — I don’t want to have the sense that I’m invading anyone’s privacy, while at the same time wanting to give some impression of my time here. (I have in fact password protected one post that seemed overly personal.) Now that the month is winding down, I’d just like [...]
They Always Get My Name Wrong
But usually it’s my last name. The Washington Post got that right, but called me James in this piece by ombudsman Deboara Howell. Along with 1,700 other people, I wrote to protest the Post’s sleazy article on Barack Obama’s mortgage. Howell’s article is pretty wishy-washy, but ultimately agrees, I think, that the Post’s story left [...]
My Life With Dogs
Testing out a slideshow service here.
Protected: Pizza for Twenty
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
BMC Week Two
Didn’t get a lot of writing done during my second week, but I read a great deal & thought about what I was reading, which is often the way I feed the work. I like the semi-solitude here, but a month of it will be enough. As with most arts colonies, one is able to [...]
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