1. The wireless card on the Toshiba Satellite L645D does not seem to be very good. 2. I continue to miss WordPerfect 5.1 and 5.2 for DOS. These current word processors all have irritating automatic features that keep turning themselves on even after I turn them off. And I really liked that reveal codes function. … More A Side Question
1. On the idea that what is professional and also healthy is to act in individualistic, self protective ways: to what economic and other models does this supposition correspond? 2. It appears to me to be neither healthy nor supportive of the profession. 3. I say that, of course, because I’m a union man and … More Notes and Fragments (On Capitalism and Gender, Perhaps)
1. [One speaker was] Brett Bowles, a French professor at SUNY Albany. . . . Bowles urged everyone in the audience to be proactive and aware of what’s going on in their universities and to make alliances across disciplinary boundaries. He encouraged larger humanities departments like English and History to stand up for the smaller majors … More From Historiann, with Emphasis Added
This has come up before, but it is time once again on this bright, academic Monday to talk about college and graduate majors we thought about, but have decided against, so far. My general thought for today is that students need more serious advising than they get. By advising, I do not mean direction, nor … More Your Alternate Majors
I need help with this. Anyone who would like to, please read and comment. You are also free to use any of my ideas in your own work. Note 1: All readings have to be short and fairly simple, since this particular student population does not have the same level of facility in Spanish that … More Notes toward the Spring 2013 Introduction to the Study of Hispanic Cultures
The President of the Modern Language Association wrote a good letter on the situation of foreign languages in general and at SUNY-Albany in particular. It is on pp. 4-5 of the Winter 2010 MLA Newsletter, and it has a bibliography including Catherine Porter’s “Presidential Address: English Is Not Enough” (PMLA 125.3 [2010]: 546-55), which I … More Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal
We had the first day of class, and it was like this. Long live my province, our painted hills, my dove. My home in New Granada; my home in California, my home anywhere in New Spain. Brown-skinned woman, do not separate yourself from the list of those I love. My most fascinating new student is … More Viva Jujuy
Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, … More Joan Didion, “On Self-Respect”
He is excellent. Read his open letter to George M Philip, President of the State University of New York At Albany. • The best way for people to be prepared for the inevitable shock of change is to be as broadly educated as possible, because today’s backwater is often tomorrow’s hot field. And interdisciplinary research, … More Gregory Petsko
I have an advertiser at $200 per annum who reminds me that I cannot stop posting. This means each post, at one post a day, is worth approximately $0.55 USD. I feel like Virginia Woolf, commenting on the economy of a small college for women in Three Guineas, or like Thackeray and other writers who … More Bound to the Masthead, or, Honorarium Slavery
