Via frizzyLogic: Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s theory of geek knitting makes complete and utter sense to me. Not because I’m a math geek — I’m not, though I love the idea that people have designed Möbius scarves, or perhaps that’s my inner Lacanian talking — but because I’m a poetry geek. Knitting has a formal logic […]
Today Salon.com‘s advice section features a letter from "Panicked Prospective Ph.D. Candidate", who is applying to a raft of Ph.D. programs but has become paralyzed with anxiety. Writes PPPh.D.C: "I don’t know if I can handle being rejected by every single school I have chosen — not that I would go off the deep end […]
In not one but two of Midwestern University’s libraries, someone has written a quotation from Shakespeare’s Richard II (Act 5, Scene 5) — "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me" — on carrel walls. Is it the work of a single obsessed Shakespearean? Several undergraduates who all took the same survey course? A […]
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a favorite poem, hasn’t it? Let’s rectify that. Personal Helicon As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. One, in a brickyard, with […]
Found via the main Typepad page: i was just really very hungry., a food blog I think I’ll be reading regularly. Handrolled sushi! Ochazuke (which I’ve never tasted but now feel compelled to try making)! Things to do with oranges in winter! Capsule reviews of food books! And gorgeous design, to boot. Now I’m hungry. […]
1. I’ve just finished drafting my personal statements for my application for the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship in Scholarly Information Resources. Go me. (Is anyone else out there applying? Please, let there not be countless hundreds of applicants. Please, let them like my application.) 2. I didn’t go to this year’s MLA convention, and after reading […]
Raymond Shapiro has worked for the NYRB since its inception, and for years proofread the personals. He estimates that from the 1960s to the ’80s he read 30,000 of them, in his own publication and elsewhere, and collated 400 or so into a book, Lonely in Baltimore. He says that back then, people were fascinated […]
I made a bunch of New Year’s resolutions, but they more or less boiled down to three or four. Here they are. In 2004, I will: make time to write every day, even if it’s only for ten minutes at a time; ask for what I want (in the job-search, but also more generally); not […]
I’ve returned from my vacation with only a few days to spare before classes start up again (Midwestern U. begins its winter term insanely early). I spent Christmas day with my family, all of us opening presents, eating ourselves silly in the middle of the day, and then playing a game of Trivial Pursuit that […]