Xmas Break

I keep thinking I’ll have a day or two to just kick back & read, post a couple of things on the blog, cook a nice dinner, but so far that hasn’t really happened. Until today, at least, I haven’t needed to drive in to school. I got my grades turned in last Sunday, then [...]

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 [...]

Lazy Fish

As far as blogging goes, I have been feeling deeply unmotivated. In my non-blogging life, I have been drifting with the current like a lazy little fish, though a fish who has a lot of papers to grade. I want to post something about the recent SLSA conference before it all becomes too hazy in [...]

I Am So Hip (for an Old Guy)

Getting in the blogroll of This Recording may not be up there with the Nobel Prize, but then I’m no Al Gore or Doris Lessing. Maybe not up there with an NEA grant of a Fulbright, quite, but making the TR blogroll is so much cooler than getting invited to Yaddo. Blogs are the new [...]

Seven Years

As of this week I’ve been writing a blog for seven years. I’ve never had much traffic & the blog is partly just a place for me to put stuff or jot down notes or lay down political rants that have to go somewhere or my head would explode. I value my few readers as [...]

Going All Meta on Blogging

Reading over my recent entries — indeed, this would be true going back to my first blog entry nearly seven years ago — it’s clear that my interests are not so much intellectual as sensual. My weblog is a graph of my engagements. Friday, October 5th, 2001:
Dewey begins Experience & Nature with the observation that [...]

Not Guilty

This is sad. The Chronicle didn’t ask me, but reading through the post & comments at Cosmic Variance, I couldn’t think of a single guilty pleasure. I used to have some, but they have faded away over time. I don’t know, maybe Partick O’Brian novels. Guilty pleasures are those things you do that seem to [...]

Things I’d Like to Write About

If I didn’t have two book reviews & a conference paper on my desk, with looming deadlines:

California as pop-culture mythos.
Verb tenses in Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” & Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.”
Shaping the Iraq narrative in the shadow of Vietnam, Or: We’re losing less badly now, so we have to [...]

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 [...]

I’m a User Not a Dealer . . .

. . . of Rich web applications, that is. Before I forget, I want to make note of this interesting essay by Uday Gajendar. I found the piece via a link from my colleague Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s blog Work / Space.) And having just completed teaching my first online course, I have some strong opinions about [...]

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