I am angry because this is considered prize winning poetry and because writing even a polite review of it takes the kind of effort grading a really bad paper does. These autobiographical poems are stories of the joys and sorrows of women in families – wives, mothers, grandmothers, aunts – on both sides of the … More This paragraph instead
[The] volume is prefaced with five blurbs that indicate the quality of its backing as well as a list of acknowledgments that make it clear the poems were written in a community of friends. This is an old convention – in Don Quixote (1605), Cervantes parodies the custom of prefacing books with long series of … More The next wicked comment
It is good that people write, but this person is not a good poet. It is difficult to come up with things to say that are diplomatic yet still true, and I feel I am putting more effort into the review than the writer did into the poems (as happens with grading papers). Of course … More The first paragraph of a bad review by me
The foreign graduate students are trying to convince a longtime faculty member not to go home to New Orleans every weekend, as he does. They have told him he is snobbish. He should respect and participate in the fascinating folkloric traditions of our town. Faculty member: I am intimately, ancestrally connected to this area. In … More 50 shades of white, or, still more on that dictum, “Take a job, any job”
It is verbal abuse. “If you were not willing to put up with just any treatment to stay in the relationship, then you never cared about this person in the first place.” That is so amazingly fatuous, but never mind. I do always notice that if you translate what academics say about the profession to … More And here is why that professor song and dance so irritates me
“Take a job, any job. If you do not like it, that means you are not a serious scholar and not cut out to be a professor.” But one of my other friends said today, “Nothing negatively affects one’s life more than a job one does not like.” That is a commonly known fact but in academia … More One more post about how professors are assholes…and also inexperienced, immature, and supercilious jerks
So today I was in Maringouin because I had a dentist’s appointment, although I wanted to be elsewhere. Duty to the appointment, duty. I was tired from driving and slept too long, almost to the time of the appointment, such that I went there without having had coffee and without having done some important errands … More What I appear to be trying to get over
“We assume you must suffer and live a small life because we cannot believe you are capable of more, or could imagine more. We do not believe you could be serious about anything, or that any of your interests could be more than half-hearted hobbies or talk.” Yes, one should have been able to rise … More And it is about this, ultimately
…is the time a woman colleague and I had to be our department’s MLA interviewing committee because only we had papers in the MLA, so only we had any funding or any reason other than hiring to go. I remember the department being scared and worried and I thought it was because this gave us … More Somehow related
…or we will be derisive toward you and say you are not serious, or that you are a traitor to our cause. But I am not cut out to be a caretaker and I am more atmosphere sensitive than some. I think that teaching remedial courses to students who do not want to be in … More Take a job, any job
coldhearted scientist وداد 