(A paper to be presented at a panel of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, Modern Language Association Annual Convention, 30 December 2009)
As a professor of English appointed to a school of nursing and its Center for Nursing Scholarship, I wear several hats. A writing coach and editor, I support faculty members’ writing goals; [...]
The Times announces that Comcast has purchased NBC Universal from General Electronic (”We Bring Good Things to Life” . . . including parts for nuclear bombs), thus “Reshaping the TV Industry.” Whatever that means.
Before G.E. could sell its controlling stake in the media company, it had to buy out the stake of Vivendi, the French media [...]
One of early twentieth-century America’s literary critiques of capitalism (hard to believe nowadays, isn’t it, that serious authors and readers might critique our economic system), Frank Norris’s The Octopus, has as its ironic tag line, “whatever the traffic will bear.”
The invisible hand of the market, we are told with mind-numbing repetition and diminishing credibility, makes [...]
A prominent entertainment “industry” figure is blackmailed by a man with a film “treatment” that describes the prominent entertainment “industry” figure’s misdeeds.
Robert Joel Halderman’s “Letterman”?
Well, I had in mind Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player, based on the book by Michael Tolkin (who also wrote the screenplay).
Halderman’s derivative plot (and considerably less serious misdeeds than in [...]
Pay no attention to the dismal (and rising) unemployment rate.
Fed chair Ben Bernanke has announced that it is likely that the Great Recession has ended.
And now last Sunday’s New York Times Style Magazine (Men’s Fashion Fall 2009) has confirmed it.
Among the luxuries available to us:
Gotho-Edwardo-Victorian frock coats and top hats.
Sheer fabric shirting.
De luxe dog tags.
A [...]
All of the recent hoopla about the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival in 1969 (if everyone who claimed to have been there were actually there, it would have required the entire state of New York to accommodate them) had me thinking about where I was in the “Summer of Love.” I don’t remember, [...]
As widely reported in the news media, the preeminent scholar of African-American studies, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a public intellectual known to a large American audience for his PBS programs on Africa and on African-American genealogy, was arrested at his home in Cambridge, MA, after he allegedly yelled at police who had come [...]
It has been over twenty years since I visited my mother’s ancestral home (her father was a McVey) in Edinburgh, Scotland, but on my next journey there I will visit Broughton Street Bookshop.
Proprietor Brian Rafferty opened the shop because he was unsuccessful in securing career employment in information technology for which he has the necessary [...]
Two used and antiquarian booksellers in Devonshire deserve attention.
In the village of Moretonhampstead, Roger Collicott Books specializes in used books, antiquarian books and manuscripts related to Devon and Cornwall. It is a tidy, well ordered store with an impressive variety of books given the narrowness of its focus. On my recent visit, the owner was busy [...]
Flying back to the States from two weeks in England, I pass the time reading The Daily Telegraph.
Front-page news: Homes with no garden will hit 2.1m next year. (The number was only 1.6 million in 1995.)
Extensive front-page and inside coverage of the war in Afghanistan (including photos and profiles of recent casualties). The war dead [...]
Here in Oxford for a three-day conference (Making Sense of Health, Illness and Disease) and to present a paper, “AIDS and the Paradigms of Dissent,” I began my visit by attending a concert in Exeter College chapel performed by Charivari Agréable and ended tonight with another concert by the same. The advantage of visiting a musical place (Oxford) in a [...]
Where is one so weak as in a bookstore? — a theme of a blog posting last year. I’m in Oxford presenting a paper at a global health conference at Mansfield College. Arriving a day early (on purpose) I spent the day wandering the streets and browsing in bookstores. Books and Oxford have been closely associated [...]
Like most boys, my second objects of infatuation and attachment (after my parents) were cars.
Growing up in the 1950s and 60s, my friends and I could tell the nuances of styling changes from one year to the next (which baffled my fifth-grade teacher, Miss Keefe), and could even recognize the make of an auto by [...]
It wasn’t enough that the Right wing, generously funded by the Mormon Church, succeeded in passing a constitutional amendment in California ending same-sex marriage. Now Ken Starr, Bill Clinton’s old nemesis, and the Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund have filed legal briefs defending the constitutionality of Prop 8 and seeking to nullify the marriages of [...]
Meenakshi Gigi Durham, associate professor of journalism at the University of Iowa and author of The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It (Overlook, 2008), reviews in the January 9, 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education a new book on the ubiquity of sex in American culture:
These complexities are [...]
After dropping off my holiday visitor at the airport, I undertook an expedition to post-holiday shopping in Buckland Hills, CT, where exhausted consumer tribes had assembled in the annual Gathering of the Nation of Shoppers.
Banana Republic features clothes with “modern fit”; I suspect I am suited for “early-modern fit.”
Anthropologie (a women’s clothing and gift store [...]
David Brooks (columnist for the New York Times) has announced his “Sidney Awards” for “long-form journalism and thought,” an antidote to the mental McNuggets of blogs and sound bites. His picks include:
”In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” by Professor X, Atlantic Monthly, June 2008
Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. [...]
A visual homage to William Schuman (in his musical homage to William Billings), the view from my front windows.
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The cultural moment of postmodernity typified by “the literature of exhaustion,” the notion that original literary forms and themes are now impossible, so all we have from our writers is a kind of smug knowingness and ironic cannibalizing of the products of high culture and pop culture.
It shows on Broadway.
Reading over last Sunday’s Times theater directory, [...]
Was interviewed tonight by Emily Corwin on “The Thought Spot” (WHUS 91.7). Go visit her ‘blog at http://www.thethoughtspot.org/
I’m thinking about sex.
(I know; you’re shocked.)
But it’s not what you think.
I’m often amused (and often more than a little bemused) about sex. About how sex is usually not about sex. And about how sex is often configured in some communities in seemingly contradictory (or to be more polite, “paradoxical”) ways.
Margaret Talbot’s article “Red Sex, [...]
Emily Dickinson provides one of the finest tests of art: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are [...]
Bathos, from the sublime . . .
to the ridiculous . . .
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We note with sadness the passing of Playgirl magazine.
If you were a gay man coming of age or coming out in the 1970s, Playgirl (ostensibly a woman’s sexual revolutionary counterpart to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy) was the most readily available soft-core erotica available, particularly where similar (and often raunchier) gay men’s mags were not available in [...]
Proctoring an exam on Saturday in the Information Technology Engineering Building, I discovered the office of The Oracle.
Faculty and professional staff are unionized here, so apparently The Oracle does not work on Saturday. I had so wanted to meet her since I had read so much about her for years.
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