As usual, Radiohead said it best: While you make pretty speeches I’m being cut to shreds You feed me to the lions A delicate balance And this just feels like spinning plates I’m living in cloud cuckoo land And this just feels like spinning plates Our bodies floating down the muddy river Which is just [...]
According to Friday’s on-line edition of Rolling Stone, U2 will have a new album out in the next six months or so: U2 are recording a new album with Danger Mouse, and they plan on releasing early next year. “We have about 12 songs with him,” Bono told The Age . “At the moment that [...]
I’m not sure what the critical consensus was on Brian Eno’s recent collaboration with David Byrne, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (2008), but the album’s certainly not going to reach the canonical status of their first project, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981). Everything that Eno does is an event, or anticipated [...]
It had to happen: one of my favorite bloggers (and good friend and colleague) Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who is away on leave this year (and currently, I believe, in Germany?), blogged about the Pippin essay yesterday, more or less simultaneously with my post. I’m not going to read hers until after I finish this, for fear [...]
My friend Ken pointed me toward a piece in the on-line version of the New York Times that ran last Sunday, October 10. I don’t want to misrepresent him, and I trust he’ll weigh in here; but my impression was that Ken appreciated the piece because it articulated something that sounded right to him about [...]
So today, the perfect segue from a bunch of writing about the life of the prof, to what (this) prof loves writing about: popular music. With a couple of colleagues, I’ve proposed a panel for an upcoming popular music conference on the topic of the urban/rural/suburban matrices of post-Woodstock music (roughly). One of us is [...]
[Sorry for the delays, mes amis. Back on the ground in Claremont, and back at my desk!] Nice work if you can get it—for all the reasons already detailed, plus this one: I’m writing this in old jeans and a sweatshirt, unshaven. I don’t have to teach today, so my “work” can look an awful [...]
Hey friends, No post: not even a picture! I’m on a weekend work trip, and giddily ran off without my laptop. It’s technically possible to post from my phone, but — well, that’s just not going to happen. So radio silence today and Sunday: I’ll be back with you Monday morning. –K Tweet This Post
So let’s try to finish this thread on professors and workload. I closed yesterday by suggesting that the only two reasons anyone enters the academy are 1) a genuine love of teaching and research, and 2) the truly extraordinary degree of academic and personal freedom. The first of these is perhaps self-evident? The teaching part, at [...]
I was aware when writing and posting yesterday that I was presenting only a very partial picture of the college teaching profession—indeed, I admitted to that partial take early on in the post. But a remark of Ken’s in the Comments section made me realize that my post yesterday could come across in a way [...]