I Do you get a huge rush when you realize, in the text you are composing, that the next paragraph will be your last? Is this moment thrilling to you because you are now about to see the work go through its penultimate metamorphosis, break free from the stone from which it has been carved, … More Tao Te Ching
Scholarly There is a difference, says Sabato, between being eclectic or scattered, and being interested in a field as a whole, or in the interrelations of its parts. I would add that there is a difference between this – to which Sabato has referred as “integralismo” – and the thinness of being a so-called generalist. … More Sobre el integralismo
Read these stories and definitions: FREIKORPS 1 – FREIKORPS 2 – STURM ABTEILUNG – SCHUTZSTAFFEL – BLACKWATER. Draw the logical conclusion. And while we are on the general topic of terrorism, visit Elaine Vigneault for the best post on web harrassment I have seen to date. I, meanwhile, have gotten back to reading Virginia Woolf, … More Freikorps
As we know, authoritarianism is a Bane. Masked authoritarianism is a particularly insidious type of Bane. I have made progress in the construction of my diaphanous screen, but the reason I have become so allergic to academia is that many people in it are primarily interested in destroying the self-respect of others and being supercilious … More On Self-Respect
I expected the first day of graduate school to be like any other school day, since I was beginning the Ph.D. program in the same department from which I had just graduated. But as I entered the building to go teach my class – this having been my first act in graduate school – I … More Diaphanous Screen
New faculty blog about the eccentricities of old faculty, but I would also like to blog about their eccentricities. Many seem to want to be exotic. They are willing to be agressive, even belligerent, about it. We have a young man who wants to be not only the first gay person we ever hired, but … More New Faculty
Today the weather was lovely and I was up early and worked all day, getting a lot done. My job at its best involves drawing pictures and saying things, much like a blog, if more officially serious (although I would say that it is in fact less serious). One narrator in my unfinished novel Madrid … More More on MADRID
Back to Shahrazad IV One such event – one of the few I understand well enough to describe, if not explain – took place in the Bank of Antioquia, where I was waiting to buy dollars. On the first day of the symposium, a secretary had ushered me into her office to sign some papers. … More Shahrazad V
So our student, an undergraduate, writes in Wikipedia, opines on websites, and gives invited lectures on topics in which she has expertise. People are scandalized. She does not have the degrees which would confer the authority to speak. Only I am unperturbed. I would say we are all involved in the same enterprise, and that … More In Which I Am Unfit to Teach
…in the book review I am currently writing [details have, of course, been duly and heavily disguised]: These are the overheated scribblings of a professor desirous of promotion, who has been up too late at too many Cultural Studies reading groups composed of scholars slightly more intelligent than he, and whose prose has been infected … More Things I Would Like to Say…
