‘Tis the season for Faux News to crank up its annual “Secularists War Against Christmas.”
Since Republicons are usually hysterians rather than historians, this page from our Puritan founder William Bradford (1590-1657) might be instructive:
“On the day called Christmas-day, the Governor called them out to work, (as was used) but the most of this new company [...]
The Vatican claims that this ad is “damaging not only to the dignity of the pope and the Catholic Church but also to the feelings of believers.” I can think of some things that the Vatican and its minions have done that have already done this damage. The Vatican is threatening suit to prevent the [...]
The Spielberg Generation–by which I do not mean Steven Spielberg’s own Baby Boomer Generation (he was born in 1946), but the generation that grew up on Spielberg films and whose fractured families are often represented in Spielberg films–is now suffering separation anxiety as still another “Daddy” has abandoned them.
Generation Kewl’s surrogate father, Steve Jobs, is [...]
Back in the 1980s and 90s, I usually brought my home-electronics custom to Circuit City, a Richmond, Virginia, based company, a regional big-box discount retailer. The prices were right, the selection was good, and the staff were skilled. Then in a stupendously stupid move earlier in the current century, they began to lay off their [...]
Donald Trump, frontrunner for the Republicon presidential nomination, revealed today that his hair was designed by American architect Frank Gehry. This revelation came on the heals of Trump’s victory in forcing the hand of President Obama to make available his alleged Hawaiian birth certificate. Since then critics and bloggers had begun to question the national [...]
This is my first and last comment on The Wedding. Like any queen, I am Anglophile. And I wish anyone well who makes public promises, especially given the recent connubial track record of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (as they were known before tidily Anglicizing the name of “the firm” to “Windsor” during World War [...]
This news item comes under the “kulcha” category.
Reported today, Rutgers University (chartered in 1766 as Queens College, opening in 1771) is bringing to its campus this week Nicole Polizzi, someone who is otherwise known as “Snooki.”
No maven of pop kulcha, I even know that “Snooki” is a celebrity du jour on one of the myriad [...]
Much in the news au courant, the “singularity” when wetware merges with hardware and software. Not exactly a new preoccupation, as Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler in the final scene of Dinner at Eight will attest.
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Several years ago at a gay writers conference, Dorothy Allison suggested that no one under 35 should publish a memoir, to which Jim Grimsley added: “Yeah, and only then if they’ve actually done something.” I found that amusing because a young acquaintance of mine had recently published a memoir of his early queer years, and [...]
Reminds me of the numerous times an eager undergraduate English major has sat in front of me (though on those occasions I was not nearly so jaundiced in my perspective as the professor avatar here).
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If the US were really a Communist dictatorship, as the Teabaggers and Republicons claim, President Obama would’ve put them all in jail.
Case in point: The Communist dictatorship of China, the place of manufacture of the computer on which you are reading this and the computer on which I am writing this.
China’s dictators imprisoned Liu Xiaobo [...]
What do Minister George Rekers; Pastor Ted Haggard, WA Legislator Richard Curtis, former congressman, Mark Foley, and Alabama Attorney General Troy King, and most recently Rev. Eddie Long (no relation to me!) have in common? Each one of them took rabid anti-gay positions in their public lives. Each one of them has been accused of [...]
Carmen Miranda was camp before camp. In this scene from an otherwise undistinguished World War II era comedy, Springtime in the Rockies, Miss Miranda, playing “Rosita Murph” (don’t ask . . . the plot contrivances are ne plus ultra) sings “Chattanooga Choochoo,” in Portugese. She was recruited by the ever prissy Edward Everett Horton (seen briefly at [...]
Widely reported recently, including this excerpt from the New York Times:
Since October 2008, the percentage of Americans who say the president is a Muslim has risen from 12 percent to 18 percent. The percentage of people who think he is a Christian has fallen from 51 percent to 34 percent. The polling data indicated that [...]
Nicholas D. Kristof, writing in last Sunday’s New York Times, “Death By Gadget,” describes how “[a]n ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras — are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo.” Our digital [...]
Attention Facebook Customers:
This may come as a shock to some of you–Facebook is a commercial business.
Facebook is not a nation state. It does not have a constitution or a supreme court that guarantees you a “right to privacy.”
In exchange for allowing us to dance around the Bonfire of the Banalities, Facebook uses data that we voluntarily [...]
At a conference of scholars (mostly historians) on the Oldest State of the South. . .
Uniformity. Unlike MLA meetings where blue jeans or black on black on black (with black Euro eyewear) prevails, the uniform of the day is the blue blazer and khaki pants (mostly men, but sometimes unisex). Depicted below, my uniformity: blue [...]
One of the things that I enjoy about attending scholarly conferences is hearing about scholars’ passions, their intellectual passions, that is.
So last night at a reception, I learned from S. J. Wolfe about the robust trade in linen mummy wrappings to feed America’s hunger for fine rag-content paper in the 19th and early 20th centuries. [...]
I’m at a scholarly conference at a small college with big pretensions, where Christian Lander could add to his list of Stuff White People Like: strip-mall neo-Colonial or convention hotel neo-Georgian architecture.
In this case, this college started out as a junior college extension of Oldest Southern College, declared its independence, got a makeover with a [...]
Google, the online data monopoly that drew ire of human rights activists when it decided several years ago to agree to filter Chinese searches in order to strike a deal with the government of the Republic of China (a totalitarian political system), has now threatened to withdraw from China after Google’s email systems were hacked [...]
The last day of MLA’s annual convention. The conference has appeared in local and national news media, as always at this time of year, though this year the headlines have seemed less preoccupied with presenters’ clever or controversial paper titles and more on the deleterious effects of the grim economy and the challenges of digital [...]
Reunions
Many spontaneous reunions occur at MLA, some planned, most serendipitous. I bump into Bob and Sylvia Scholnick (College of William & Mary) on the train. Attending Bob’s session that night, I catch up with John Miller (Longwood University) whose dissertation director was Bob Scholnick. I stop to say “Hi” to Richard Dellamora outside the Loews [...]
Council of Editors of Learned Journals Meetings
At the conclusion of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) awards ceremony today, outgoing (in both senses of that term) CELJ president, Bonnie Wheeler (editor of Arthuriana), addressed several recurring questions of journal editors in recent years, particularly related to ownership and credentialing.
What constitutes a “learned journal,” [...]
TheLongView began two years ago this week (thanks to my brother Jim Long’s birthday gift to me of the domain name and a Christmas gift later in the year of the Web server and blog design and setup) with my blogging on the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in Chicago in 2007.
So like salmon we [...]
David Brooks invites us to turn off the TV (or turn off the iPhone, the Wii, the iPod, YouTube, &c.) in order to read a long-form published essay, in his annual Sidney Awards.
Among the topics healthcare leads the list, but also American (in)justice, local DC politics (in the person of Marion Barry) and Afghanistan.
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