I am not a good consumer of novels, they seem long and not always interesting enough for the effort they take, but on the plane I started reading David Trueba’s Saber perder and I liked it. I have slightly ruined it by speed-reading and also reading ahead, skipping around. I should not do this because … More Reading novels
It is a film by Petra Costa about Bolsonaro and it is opening in San Francisco January 5, although it is almost a year old and is apparently available on Netflix already. Apparently it is very important and we should show it in class if there is any way to justify doing something in Portuguese. … More The edge of democracy
For ages I kept around this essay by Linda Gordon, from Dissent (Spring 1999, 41-47), called “The trouble with difference.” As she notes, it follows on a piece of hers in Genders (1991) on related issues. She says gender difference called up hopes of community among women, sisterhood; differences among women (typically racial) reinforce bonds … More For Anzaldúa and JALLA
This is another hip course I could give, at an advanced level, with a baby-level that would be a freshman seminar. SPANISH language writing would be the topic, we wouldn’t work on English language writing, or read a lot of Spanglish. Algunos nombres: Elizabeth Acevedo (“The Poet X” se ha traducido al español), Gloria Anzaldúa, … More US Latinos writing in Spanish
If I were to do a freshman seminar like that, we’d read plays we aren’t reading in other classes, and do dramatic readings. We’d learn to write abstracts, summaries, and annotated bibliographies; we’d learn how to seriously look things up in the library. I’ll have to keep working on this. The classic play to read, … More Freshman seminar in the Lorca lab
Another old journal I am going to clear out is the 1986 Social Text that has in it Jameson’s article “Third World Literature and the West.” Here he uses the term national allegory – not quite for the first time, but it is still new here. He reveals how much he likes Balzac. And he … More Third World Literature; Our America and the West
It seemed like pleasant work, getting the house ready for the cleaner and rearranging books so I could finish my paper, but I got to a more total rearrangement, recycled a lot of journal issues, and got other books and papers corralled for recycling and reduction. There was a review essay on Freyre in LARR … More Gilberto Freyre
There is The Borders of Dominicanism, useful to me in that it invokes another borderland with the U.S. There is At the edges of states: Dynamics of state formation in the Indonesian borderlands (Michael Eilenberg) The book rests on the premise that remote border regions offer an exciting study arena that can tell us important … More Books and things on nations and borders
And in fact I did little, but I did: Decide I have done enough research for this paper, even if there are blind spots in my work, and I will just write it up and that is it, the heck with everything. Definitively decide about my hedge: all I need for now are three Green … More Today I thought I did nothing
Inviting a consul can go beyond a reception. It can be a community event with the Consul and her or his staff speaking to students and faculty, the local business community, immigrant organizations, and so on. A Consul can explain international trade, education abroad opportunities, food, and cultural exchanges … give a great deal of … More That consular visit
coldhearted scientist وداد 