I must also post to the reading class website, instructions for their assignment. They know the assignment but they will need very specific instructions. For Valentine’s Day they are each presenting on a love song, and identifying rhetorical situations and techniques in love songs. But they must have step by step instructions or they will … More On Spain
Questions of space and time were issues in all the texts I taught today, in three different classes on three different things. I feel behind on work, and the students feel behind on Spanish and on general knowledge. At the same time the authors of the texts we are reading, and the characters in them … More On modernism
Acercándose viene un tiempo de Dios, santo; fuime para mi tierra a descansar un cuanto, de entonces a ocho días era Cuaresma, tanto que puso por él mundo gran miedo y gran espanto. I will say that again in Old Spanish soon. I will post messages to two classes this very night. One was thrown … More Arcipreste de Hita
I am always fatigued after teaching more than two classes in a day. Today I cleaned house in the morning, went to the office in the afternoon, and socialized at the art studio in the evening. Now I have been investigating the theories of Américo Castro and David Theo Goldberg, so my hour tally comes … More Work tracking Wednesday
“She has an uncanny ability to filter my ideas through her own and make me see what I am really doing.” –Jonathan (most recently). Discuss. This is actually a comment I have gotten several times on student evaluations. It is also the reason people in other disciplines sometimes name me in acknowledgements on the basis … More On interpretation
Another book I have never read is the History of Sexuality — I was bored with Foucault when it came out and could not take him seriously, and I have never gotten back to it. I should probably read it now along with everything else there is about the body, because race is about bodies, … More Corpus delicti
Modernism in literature is (often) the effort of a national elite to develop a theory of national identity that is both modern and traditionalist, that negotiates claims of exceptionalism / universality. Modernism is distinctively peripheral, not prototypically metropolitan, in that it is interested in those romantic notions of identity that are more distinctive around the … More Wir sind soweit
→ Kraniauskas essay in the Archivos edition of El Señor Presidente. This book is not about the origins of the state but its nationalization. I have never read it but now want to. It is avant-garde and about the state, so I cannot lose. → Misplaced ideas. Roberto Schwarz came up with this term and … More Fragments, and a proto-theory of Spain
3-9 work on a class, six hours, category teaching, and that is it. On the theory of touching research every day, I hereby commit to read something useful starting at 11 PM, one hour, category research, making this a seven hour day which is respectable. I have some service I really must do soon. Six … More Work Monday
Are triangulation, encroachment and enmeshment particularly Latin, or are they just epiphenomena of any patriarchal system? Man 1, at work: wants me to ally with him against Woman 1. I refuse so I am a “Puritan.” Man 2, at work: wants me to ally with him against Man 1 and with Woman 1. I refuse … More A serious question
coldhearted scientist وداد 