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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“Don’t be such an old poop!” Ethel Thayer to Norman Thayer in Mark Rydell’s film, On Golden Pond, based on Ernest Thompson’s play (screenplay by Ernest Thompson).
Well I have become an old poop, perhaps, but the loons are not very welcoming. It is the prerogative of people in mid-life to lament the declension of younger [...]
Is “neuro” the new “nano”?
Until recently “nano-” whatever (and before that, “geno-” whatever) was all the rage. In a nation as scientifically illiterate as it is historically illiterate and culturally illiterate as ours, perhaps at first blush it might seem contradictory that we would entertain one mania after another, like Toad of Toad Hall, with [...]
I have long been a student of the art of sham fui, the ancient art of conning gullible Westerners who have more money than sense. Recently, I conversed with a woman who told me that she had been an adjunct instructor in the School of Education at a local university; when I asked her what [...]
The week that Eliot Spitzer came clean (pun intended) about his creative financing of sessions with a high-end sex worker, my students in the second semester of a survey of world literature course were looking at Freud’s account of his patient “Dora.”
I’ve configured the world lit course as an exploration (I just typed and corrected [...]
Calvin Tomkins, in an article in the January 28, 2008 issue of The New Yorker (”Lifting the Veil: Old Masters, Pornography, and the Work of John Currin”), recounts a conversation with the painter John Currin in which the painter speculates that pornography is a kind of elegy to liberal culture: “I know how right wing [...]
“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” Henry Ward Beecher famously asked (and reading Debby Applegate’s recent bio of the nineteenth-century celebrity preacher, The Most Famous Man in America, you learn that he knew something about the weakness of human nature).
My name is Tom, and I am a bookaholic.
“Hello, Tom.”
I came to [...]
According to the results of a recently released survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, they don’t go to television and radio to find information in order to solve a problem (or only 16% do).
A substantial majority of respondents (58%) claimed the Internet as their source. Many of them are using public libraries [...]
The recent annual Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting took up the theme, The Humanities at Work in the World.
For the uninitiated, the humanities are those fields of human labor, knowledge, and creativity that include languages and literatures, fine and performing arts, and history (if you don’t call history a social science).
The MLA scholars pondered two [...]
A delicious moment in the interminable presidential primary farrago: Mike Huckabee shows reporters (including TV reporters) his campaign’s anti-Romney TV ad but only to tell them that his campaign won’t be showing the anti-Romney TV ad on TV.
In classical rhetoric this is known as paralepsis, a pretended omission, mentioning a topic by saying that you [...]
I hate having to wake up in the dark, a recovered memory perhaps of the summer between high school and college when I had to wake up at 4:00 am to work in a sand pit loading sand dug from the alluvial plain of Anne Arundel County, Maryland, into dump trucks that hauled ass down [...]
Who else but thousands of scholars in language and literature would fly from around the world to a cold northern North American city between Christmas and New Year’s (as if American air travel were not bad enough) in order to confabulate, cruise, interview job supplicants . . . I mean “applicants,” be interviewed as job [...]
Is blogging but old bloviation writ small, or is it, like the emerging prose genres in the early print age, a new discourse for new ways of thinking? Is the blog the twenty-first century equivalent of Montaigne’s essays, or only the itch-scratching multimediated version of CB radio? Follow along, my friends, and we shall see. [...]
