Michelle, earlier this month, posted about her disgruntlement with the kind of student whose only frame of reference is his or her own experience, and who is disinclined to consider any other possible frames of reference. As Michelle puts it: It seems that particular mindset just isn’t embracing one of the aspects of literature i […]
Bill Keaggy collects found grocery lists and exhibits them at his site. As a recent New York Times article on his grocery list collection explains, entire personalities can be pieced together (or not) from these found documents: ”Some people pass judgment on the things they buy,” Keaggy says. At the end of one list, the […]
Happiness is coming home from an afternoon’s grocery-store trip, turning on the Sunday Opera Matinee in mid-broadcast, thinking "hey, is that Strauss?" and then realizing, as the strains of Baron Ochs’s waltz emerge from the radio, that they’re playing Der Rosenkavalier, and one has arrived home in time to hear all of the last act. […]
Look, it’s a reference desk sestina! From TangognaT, who’s also written reference haiku. Marvelous. I am inspired. Henceforth my diary-esque posts will take the form of short autobiographical free verse poems in the manner of Frank O’Hara. (My lunch hour walks have been accompanied by lots of "I do this, I do that" inner monologue […]
This morning I woke up, dragged myself out of bed in the still-dark, switched on the radio, stumbled to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee brewing, took a shower — thinking, all the while, "Gee, I’m tired. I must not have slept very well" — and then put on my bathrobe, my glasses, […]
I have been slow to blog about the death of Jacques Derrida. He wasn’t as formative an influence on me as he was on others, but his essay "Freud and the Scene of Writing," together with the text it comments on, Freud’s "A Note on the Mystic Writing Pad," helped shape key parts of my […]
Because sometimes you need some eye/ear/tastebud candy… For the eyes: Zoom Quilt (how did they do that? — via things magazine); Balnea, a virtual museum of sea-bathing (via Ramage, which I can’t believe I didn’t discover earlier) For the ears: the jazzy Brazilian French Japanese Italian noirish lounge stylings of Pink Martini. Their cover of […]
Via Professor Dyke: Post three of your… Pet Peeves: 1) Double doors with one door locked for no apparent reason. (Why? Why? Why?) 2) The mixture of fear and disdain with which some people regard public transportation. 3) Microsoft frelling Word. AAAAARGH. (Insert stream of curses here.) Favorite Sounds: 1) An orchestra tuning up before […]
Here follows an announcement from Anya Kamenetz, author of the Village Voice article “Wanted: Really Smart Suckers,” about which I blogged some time back. She’s looking for graduate students to interview for an upcoming book. I’m posting the announcement she sent me in case any of you who come here for the postacademic commentary are […]