This is Las hurdes or Terre sans pain (1933), by Luis Buñuel. We are going to see it in my class on modern Spanish literature. It is very interesting and engages questions of civilization and barbarism, modernity and the primitive, city and country, center and margin. It is a documentary but as cinematography it is experimental, … More Las Hurdes
So far today I have done the following: 8:45 e-mail 9:00-10:45 prepare one class (efficiency high, but this was not quite enough time, as it turned out) 11:00-12:15 teach said class 12:15-1:00 office hours, during which I met with a colleague and a student to create a new outreach program and also worked on an … More Tracking work, again
I do not know how I came upon this piece as I was doing something else but it appears that orphanhood is what generates the novel. Vallejo, as we know, kept saying he was an orphan and I do not have a lot of patience with complaints from persons orphaned as adults, or with persons … More On Vallejo, Heidegger, and my other project
I woke up this morning realizing it was the King holiday and that in my life, this holiday is more important than traditional holidays like Christmas. I woke up thinking about real life. I woke up this morning thinking about real life and how we can reach out and touch it now. This is the … More La vida real
This post follows the discussion on competition and I came up with it as I tried to figure out how to reorganize my files so as to work better, and considered programs like Scrivener. I saw that Scrivener is a wiki, which is why I find it attractive; it has a sidebar that you can … More You and your career as a wiki
People talk about liberating themselves by recycling their paper files, but what about computer files? It is not just that I have half of mine in one cloud and half in the other. It is that several times, due to computer emergencies, I have transferred files chaotically over the years. For example: within Dropbox there … More On files
My problem is not that I am not using Scrivener, or that half my files are in the Ubuntu cloud and the other half in Dropbox. My problem is that I am acting in it the way I have been taught to act by Reeducation, of which one part is daily life at my current … More How to organize my manuscript
I woke up this morning thinking of a friend I made in college. We were friendly in classes but became friends one day when we coincided at the pool and fell into conversation about other things. That was so long ago. It was when university gyms still issued their faded swimsuits. Really skilful women could … More Hoy es domingo, y por eso
1. I was always warned in graduate school that if I got an academic job I would not get to teach foreign languages because the T.A.’s would do it, and also that I should not construct myself as someone who likes it, anyway, because to get a tenure track job you had to construct yourself … More On militant Hispanism
I used to give the culture class as an issues-in-culture class and it was good, but now I am giving it as a true cultural studies class and it is outright exciting, partly because it is so theoretically precise. Here is the issue: I have a curriculum. The administration now says that since it is … More On disciplines
