One of the best media critics is Karl Kraus, whose Last Days of Mankind satirized the Viennese of his day in their love of gossip and gossip dressed up as news. Coffeeshops were abuzz with the latest rumors and disasters, culminating in the disaster of WW I. What I always remember from this play, a … More The past resembles the present
It’s interesting how relativist arguments get used in apologetics for institutions that claim to have had the absolute truth always and forever. C’est le post du jour et c’est très important. Axé.
There was something I heard from an unexpected quarter about nation and state as separate things, or things working separately, and that I would like to reencounter. I saw a film of an anti-MOOC symposium in which a literature professor talked about the large, live lecture as a way to model close reading and to … More Cette semaine
…so what do you think of this? Recognizing that in the contemporary postcolonial moment, national identity and cultural nationalism are no longer the primary modes of imagining sovereignty, Sheri-Marie Harrison argues that postcolonial critics must move beyond an identity-based orthodoxy as they examine problems of sovereignty. In Jamaica’s Difficult Subjects: Negotiating Sovereignty in Anglophone Caribbean … More Imagining sovereignty
The book, with a podcast. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ideas that most Americans lived by started to fragment. Mid-century concepts of national consensus, managed markets, gender and racial identities, citizen obligation, and historical memory became more fluid. Flexible markets pushed aside Keynesian macroeconomic structures. Racial and gender solidarity divided into … More The Age of Fracture
Axé.
Axé.
Everything she does is deniable. There is always a facile excuse or an explanation. Cruelties are couched in loving terms. Aggressive and hostile acts are paraded as thoughtfulness. Selfish manipulations are presented as gifts. Criticism and slander is slyly disguised as concern. She only wants what is best for you. She only wants to help … More One, and two
I may not work hard enough, but I am very intelligent and I am surely the only one who will illuminate Elena Poniatowska’s Querido Diego with Nick Cave: But the peculiar magic of the love song, if it has the heart to do it, is that it endures where the object of the song does … More Voici my teaching unit
A related feature of the abstract image—one which may make it increasingly attractive to poets—is that abstract statement permits a far wider range of subject matter than we generally find in a poem dependent entirely upon occasion. The emotional range, the subject matter of poems based upon a particular occasion—on a dramatic situation or incident—is … More More Holden
