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. [...]
