Knitting in Flight
Carole is getting ready to do some international travel next week, so we have been going over the usual litany of indignities one is now subjected to in order to get on an airplane. Carole is also a knitter, which means she uses knitting needles, which are banned by the airline she is flying. Now [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Potsdam (NY) to Portland (ME) in 20 Hours
What was supposed to be a six hour trip down to Boston & up to Portland for the SLSA conference turned into a 20 hour marathon yesterday when my Delta commuter plane from Ogdensberg had to go back to the hanger for repairs. I didn’t get out of Ogdensberg until late in the afternoon and [...]
Baseball’s Christianist Assholes; Or: Go Boston!
I was getting ready to root for the Rockies in the World Series, partly because I love a newcomer / underdog & partly because I think more than one championship a century would be bad for Boston’s soul. And then Michael O’Hare at the RBC blog had to ruin my (admittedly superficial) fan-affiliation by linking [...]
Writing a Paper
I haven’t written a conference paper in a long time. After I was promoted to full prof in 2003 I made a conscious decision to cut back on conferences, though in truth (with the exception of several years of AWP) I’d never been a big conference-goer. The MLA meeting always gave me the creeps. Too [...]
Can’t Say that I’m Surprised, Redux: Christianist Creeps
Apparently there are a few problems down at Oral Roberts University. (I always want to put university in scare quotes when I type that phrase.) Look, as I said before, I grew up among these corrupt bastards. I’m surprised that anyone is surprised.
John Latta on Louise Bogan on Shifting Poetic Style, Or: My Poetic Lineage (II)
Latta is always worth reading, but the post that begins with this pair of paragraphs puts a whole run of literary history into high relief:
Odd to think that Stephen Crane’d be a mere four years older than Robert Frost. That spare pre-imagist verse—Crane call’d himself an “impressionistâ€â€”of Black Riders publish’d at age twenty-four. Louise Bogan—in [...]
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