Tomorrow night I leave for El Salvador for my spring break adventure. I am a little nervous about this, since I’ve never gone on such a trip before, but I’m also looking forward to it. There will be four faculty members and fifteen students making the journey.
A delegation goes every year at spring break, and [...]
Archive for February, 2008
Going South
Posted in teaching on February 27, 2008 | 7 Comments »
An Open Letter to BMC Bicycles
Posted in cycling on February 26, 2008 | 11 Comments »
Dear BMC Bicycles:
I’ll get straight to the point: I would like you to send me a 2008 BMC Pro Machine (blue) built up with Campagnolo Record components. I understand that this request, coming from a 40 year old college English professor probably makes little sense. It may come across as outrageously presumptuous, or even recklessly [...]
Good Clean Living
Posted in Uncategorized on February 25, 2008 | 4 Comments »
The past couple of weeks have been more than usually stressful. Last fall, the university president’s office decided to co-sponsor with the faculty governance council an intense retreat to discuss our school’s retention issues, and I volunteered to serve on the planning committee. It’s an issue that interests me, and, politically, it’s a [...]
A New Bicycle
Posted in memes on February 24, 2008 | 2 Comments »
No, not really. If I really got a new bicycle, I’d put the title in bold, all caps, and finish with at least five or six exclamation points. What I’m really talking about is a funny little internet meme that I just discovered. A guy in San Francisco was thinking about how he was gently [...]
Tagged and Time
Posted in memes, writing on February 12, 2008 | 5 Comments »
I haven’t had much time to think about blogging or reading or writing or anything else, really. To give you an idea of what’s going on, I have three meetings this week and at least six next week and four the following week, one of them an all-day thing. Plus, I’m leaving for El Salvador [...]
Storytelling and Dinner
Posted in Books on February 7, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I have always been fascinated by our fascination with telling stories. We all like to hear them, and many of us also like to tell them. In one of my classes, I am teaching The Odyssey, and I point out to my students all of the times Homer makes explicit references to the [...]
Stephen King Plagiarized Me!
Posted in Books, writing on February 6, 2008 | 3 Comments »
In 1992 or ‘93 I wrote a poem called “Lanakila Homecoming,” in which I described some storm clouds looking like “brains thinking bad thoughts.” In Stephen King’s Duma Key, published in 2008, he says:
The thunderheads stacked up, huge flatboats black on the bottom and bruise-purplish through the middle. Every know and then lightning would flash [...]
Reading and Relating: A Rant
Posted in Books, teaching on February 4, 2008 | 7 Comments »
“I just can’t relate to the story,” several students complained. “The characters’ problems just aren’t real to me.” I tried. I worked harder in front of a class than I have in years. I dug into the story. I pulled in historical context. I explained the political situation. I outlined the social constraints. I agreed [...]
Celebrity Cycling
Posted in cycling on February 3, 2008 | 1 Comment »
A few weeks back on our Epic Tuesday Ride (TM), we stopped at a bakery in Westchester county. One of the riders, Apu (more on his nickname in a minute), went back into the bakery for more and, while he was in there, made a celebrity sighting. He came back out with a [...]
Rolling Meditation
Posted in cycling on February 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Sometimes I don’t know where I am going to ride. This does not happen very often, since I tend to be more than a little bit obsessive about knowing my routes, but there are times when I surprise myself. A few weeks ago I went out with a fairly clear idea of the roads I [...]
