I heard on NPR this morning that Paul Muldoon is the New Yorker‘s new poetry editor. I was tickled to hear them discussing his poem "Capercaillies," which spells out, acrostically, "Is this a New Yorker poem or what." Given that my responses to most of the recent New Yorker poems have ranged from "mildly disappointed" […]
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Amanda
As I was scanning Salon’s recent review of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s latest installment in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, my eye was caught by a sentence that started thusly: In the course of the book, we encounter, among other things, a brief prose piece in the merged styles of P.G. Wodehouse and […]
"Decline of the Tenure Track Raises Concerns," reports yesterday’s New York Times. I must confess that my first reaction was somewhere between "Gee, ya think?" and "This is news?", with accompanying eye-rolling. I’d probably be a tad less cynical if the decline of the tenure track hadn’t started, oh, twenty years ago, and if people […]
In honor of everyone heading off for Thanksgiving, one of my favorite bits from The Great Gatsby: One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock […]
Most of the biblioblogosphere is talking about Kindle, Amazon’s new e-book reader. After rooting around the Kindle site trying to find detailed descriptions of what kinds of files it supports and what the terms of service are, I have to say I’m underwhelmed. On the one hand, I think a lightweight e-book reader with a […]
It’s November, it’s cold (the kind of cold you don’t notice at first but that gets into your bones nonetheless), it’s rainy, SEPTA’s regional rail trains are all running late because it’s rainy and there are leaves on the tracks, there’s way too much to do before the end of this term at Drexel, and […]
I’m still on my "space and place" kick, and probably will be for quite a while: it has all the signs of becoming a productive research obsession. Among the latest manifestations: Someone recently drew my attention to Ecotone, a new literary journal out of the University of North Carolina. It deals with the concept of […]
So today I taught a library instruction session for a class. In a classroom whose technological setup I hadn’t checked in advance. (Those of you who do anything at all with instructional technology probably know where this is going.) And after I’d discovered that there was no computer in the room and raced back to […]
Monday night’s class was on classification systems, and at one point, we talked about the ubiquity of classifications, using grocery store aisles as an example. Specifically, what happens if the store owners decide to classify coffee filters as paper products and put them in Aisle 6 with the paper towels, but the caffeine-deprived shoppers expect […]
I’m at the bottom of a heap of coursework right now. Expect light blogging for the next couple of weeks (not that there’s been a torrent of posts around here lately to begin with). In the meantime, have a look at a few things I’ve just added to my del.icio.us bookmarks: Great Moments in the […]