It is easily possible to live yet better. To do so, one must remember not to torture oneself (I am so trained to that that I do it automatically unless I remind myself that I can be kinder, as I have in fact ben in some eras). One must also remember that one has rights … More Pour méditer cette semaine
This might turn out to be a Hollywood-style film, but one must see it for the soundtrack at least. I think I will show it at the beginning of my Colonial class in the fall, and then use the semester to show how the continent got to that point. Axé.
To make some decisions about software and train myself in current versions of it, I reformatted a short document with endnotes, that book review I struggled with and complained about before. As a rule one should not review what one does not like. But I find reviewing new poetry very instructive and I learned a … More Othering Spanish
One of the best media critics is Karl Kraus, whose Last Days of Mankind satirized the Viennese of his day in their love of gossip and gossip dressed up as news. Coffeeshops were abuzz with the latest rumors and disasters, culminating in the disaster of WW I. What I always remember from this play, a … More The past resembles the present
It’s interesting how relativist arguments get used in apologetics for institutions that claim to have had the absolute truth always and forever. C’est le post du jour et c’est très important. Axé.
There was something I heard from an unexpected quarter about nation and state as separate things, or things working separately, and that I would like to reencounter. I saw a film of an anti-MOOC symposium in which a literature professor talked about the large, live lecture as a way to model close reading and to … More Cette semaine
…so what do you think of this? Recognizing that in the contemporary postcolonial moment, national identity and cultural nationalism are no longer the primary modes of imagining sovereignty, Sheri-Marie Harrison argues that postcolonial critics must move beyond an identity-based orthodoxy as they examine problems of sovereignty. In Jamaica’s Difficult Subjects: Negotiating Sovereignty in Anglophone Caribbean … More Imagining sovereignty
The book, with a podcast. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ideas that most Americans lived by started to fragment. Mid-century concepts of national consensus, managed markets, gender and racial identities, citizen obligation, and historical memory became more fluid. Flexible markets pushed aside Keynesian macroeconomic structures. Racial and gender solidarity divided into … More The Age of Fracture
Axé.
Axé.
