One thing I hadn’t fully realized before I started planning to move to Virginia: moving any great distance involves a curious combination of practicalities and undercurrents of emotion. The last couple of times I moved, it was only across town; before that, when I moved from Chicago to Collegeville, I had no furniture and I […]
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Amanda
In general, my reasons for not posting about politics are rather like Michelle’s: other people do it far better than I can. It’s not that I’m not paying attention in my offline life, but there are enough political bloggers out there without me, Literature Geek, pointing to the same links. That, and when something happens […]
This just in from the BBC: archaeologists think they’ve found the site of the Library of Alexandria. Yup, that one. That is just so cool. My youthful fantasies of becoming an archaeologist just resurfaced after a decade and a half of dormancy. [Title of this post from the last line of C. P. Cavafy’s "The […]
I’m formulating something in response to the discussion at Frogs and Ravens and Liliputian Lilith about intellectuals in and out of the university. In the meantime, here are a few of the other (massive and weighty) questions I’ve been pondering: 1. When did all novels start appearing with the subtitle "A Novel" on their front […]
Languagehat posts a new John Ashbery poem from the NYRB. An excerpt: We were warned about spiders, and the occasional famine. We drove downtown to see our neighbors. None of them were home. We nestled in yards the municipality had created, reminisced about other, different places— but were they? Hadn’t we known it all before? […]
The semester is officially over and the grades are in, which means that it’s officially Grade Complaint Season. I don’t mind showing students numerical breakdowns of how they did in class (actually, I do mind that, a bit; I hate having to quantify everything), but what I really don’t like is finding multiple "Why did […]
His imagination was singularly vigorous and creative; and no doubt it derived additional force from the habitual use of morphine, which he swallowed in great quantity, and without which he would have found it impossible to exist. It was his practice to take a very large dose of it immediately after breakfast each morning, — […]
"Wanted: Really Smart Suckers", by Anya Kamenetz of the Village Voice, should be required reading for all aspiring graduate students. Particularly this quote from comp lit Ph.D. Dan Friedman: "I didn’t know what I was getting into. It would have been different if I had known. You’re committed to your subject and you think, I […]
I found out about Poem on Your Blog Day via this Metafilter thread, one of whose contributors has made me very happy by posting Frank O’Hara’s "Having a Coke with You." I find it all but impossible to pick just one poem, but for some reason I thought of this one: But I Can’t Time […]
Thank you all so much for the good wishes. Gosh. [shuffles feet, mumbles something incoherent but pleased] We return you now to your regularly scheduled agenda: In the department of Post/Academic Linkage, everyone has already linked to this, but I’m heartened to see the Invisible Adjunct getting some press. Everyone is also already linking to […]