Getting that MLA proposal down to less than 1000 words

Vallejo: Language Itself [I am not sure this title covers it, but a better one is not coming to me, and this has been improved since I posted it … but I am still interested in the question of the title] Borges said Quevedo was a poet of language: “La grandeza de Quevedo es verbal” (“Quevedo,” … More Getting that MLA proposal down to less than 1000 words

The MLA, and a diagnosis, and some fascinating questions

The theme of the 2016 MLA convention is Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future. In the meantime, I am told there are two types of academic worker: intellectual knowledge workers and educational service workers. This is my problem: I am supposed to be the former, but pressed to be the latter. It is all well … More The MLA, and a diagnosis, and some fascinating questions

Jonathan Rees

I should read him more, and I should have seen this sooner. To borrow some inflammatory language from Marc Bousquet, the second is a waste product of the first. If the MOOC providers are like meatpackers, then the flipped classroom is how they’re going to get us to eat their offal. Now, we should look … More Jonathan Rees

Michael Pollan

“The brain is a hierarchical system,” Carhart-Harris said. “The highest-level parts”—such as the default-mode network—“have an inhibitory influence on the lower-level parts, like emotion and memory.” He discovered that blood flow and electrical activity in the default-mode network dropped off precipitously under the influence of psychedelics, a finding that may help to explain the loss … More Michael Pollan

MLA 2016

The abstract. Reading Vallejo against the grain of identity Taking as its point of departure not only the poetic subject in Vallejo as primordially fractured but the intimations in his prose works that like his contemporary Borges (“La nadería de la personalidad,” 1925) he eschewed the idea of a unified self, this presesentation will interrogate … More MLA 2016

Dieci anni

An old student came by; it had been ten years. She said our workplace is a sad one, that many traumatic events have taken place, but that I look the same as ever and seem happy. I changed her life, she said, by convincing her she could do the professional things she did not think … More Dieci anni

A flash I had

…about the introjected torturer. About the feeling of being imprisoned. You must go back in your box, back in your cage. The way I dissociate ever so slightly with this. Important: who has imprisoned me? I do not think it is the university. I think it is family and friends who imprisoned me here after … More A flash I had