I know that quite a few fellow academics read this blog, and because of this, I have taken upon myself the arduous and humiliating task of serving as the Designated Moron(tm) to make professors all over the world feel better about themselves. When a professor in, say, Kansas, reads my blog, she can say to [...]
Archive for April, 2007
Losing My Mind
Posted in Uncategorized on April 30, 2007 | 3 Comments »
New Voice
Posted in Uncategorized on April 26, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Some blatant promotion: There is a new voice in the blogs worth reading. Jump over to “The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.” She’s a smart, sensitive reader and a thoughtful writer with a lovely voice. How do I know? Readers, she’s my student. She was longing for a bookish community outside [...]
The Joy of Text, Part I
Posted in Uncategorized on April 26, 2007 | 2 Comments »
My academic life is haunted by literary criticism, and that lit crit frequently seems to me to be devoted to denying the existence of joy or pleasure in reading. I realize that this is a terribly unfair statement, and that a great deal of lit crit does, in fact, recognize and even celebrate the [...]
Lesson Plans Awry
Posted in Uncategorized on April 25, 2007 | 3 Comments »
In my old blog home, I frequently found that readers had stumbled across my blog by searching for lesson plans on one of the books or stories I was discussing. I very rarely put actual lesson plans on the blog, largely because I so rarely use real lesson plans in my classes. Perhaps in primary [...]
The Ecstatic Now
Posted in Uncategorized on April 23, 2007 | 3 Comments »
Jonathan Edwards struggles mightily–and, perhaps, vainly–to express his sense of ecstatic transcendence. He says:
And as I was walking there, and looked up on the sky and clouds; there came into my mind, a sweet sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, that I know not how to express. I seemed to see them [...]
Earth Day Field Trip
Posted in Uncategorized on April 21, 2007 | 7 Comments »
I am lucky enough at my university to be able to teach a lot of courses that I make up; I do my share of the core, but I have also developed a repertoire of upper-division literature and writing classes. One of my mainstay classes, one I teach every other spring, is Nature Writing. [...]
Professing: Therapy
Posted in Uncategorized on April 20, 2007 | 5 Comments »
Dean Dad has a post up today about dealing with students and their personal problems. As usual, it is an interesting post, speaking as it does to the college teacher’s dilemma of dealing with students who are adults and free to destroy themselves if they so choose. I have been thinking about this [...]
Demonic Personification
Posted in Uncategorized on April 18, 2007 | 2 Comments »
I tend to leap at what seem like good ideas without full preparation and then, like Wile E. Coyote, I find myself suspended in midair, looking down at a huge chasm beneath me. I then hold up a little sign that reads “Oh no!”, or something like that, before plummeting to the ground with [...]
Pulitzer: The Road
Posted in Uncategorized on April 17, 2007 | 5 Comments »
I posted this originally on my old blog, but since I deleted all of those posts, I thought I would re-post this here in honor of McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize.
I first heard about Cormac McCarthy in graduate school, when All the Pretty Horses made its first stir and many of the professors in my department were [...]
Regeneration?
Posted in Uncategorized on April 16, 2007 | 4 Comments »
I am teaching some of Flannery O’Connor’s stories this week, and today we focused on “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” I had planned to write today about the violent themes and images that permeate O’Connor’s fiction, something along the line of Slotkin’s “regeneration through violence” notion, but I now do so with more [...]
