I’ve been thinking a lot about my job lately, in the early days of the new school year. I know this is nothing a hipster would say, but I just love my job. I love my profession; I love my career. And I was thinking today about how it all started. When I was sixteen [...]
Not surprisingly—no surprise to me, anyway—discussions last night of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read with our first-year students were very animated and very smart. Each year we assign one common book for all of our incoming students to read, ostensibly as a kind of community-building exercise: All of our first-year [...]
I’m going to write today’s posts in two parts: the pre-freshman portion and the post-freshman portion. (We don’t really use the word “freshman” anymore, of course, but the phrase “pre-first-year students” just doesn’t work. The eye is offended.) Tonight (Sunday night), along with a couple dozen of my colleagues at Pomona College, I’ll be leading [...]
If you opened this page hoping to find a discussion of Rihanna’s video for “Umbrella,” I’m sorry to have deceived you. Well, not “sorry,” exactly: I mean, I did it with malice aforethought. But that’s not exactly the agenda here today; rather this is a “meta-discussion” of the video—a discussion of a discussion of the [...]
All of this begs the question, for Kruger as well as for any politically engaged postmodern artist: If we’re all patsies of the simulacrum, how can we choose a political program? How does one slip out from under “remote control” in order to make decisions with any but false consciousness? In U2′s Zoo TV Live [...]
The reason for Kruger’s dyspepsia, it seems to me, is splashed across the cover. For though we (viewers) may think we wield the remote control, in fact, says Kruger, we are the ones controlled: “To those who understand how pictures and words shape consensus, we are unmoving targets waiting to be turned on and off [...]
At its worst, Kruger’s prose sounds like a ditto prepared for Postmodernism 101: “History has been the text of the dead dictated to the living, through a voice which cannot speak for itself. The ventriloquist that balances corpses on its knee, that gives speech to silence, and transforms bones and blood into reminiscences, is none [...]
Mes Chères, Working on my summer research, I was trying to remember something I thought I’d said about U2 in a review essay published back in 1994 in the online journal Postmodern Culture. When I found it and re-read it, I was surprised, actually, that I had written it: it’s been so long since I’ve [...]
I headed back to Dublin in June 2007, where I spent six weeks directing an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on Ulysses. Actually, there’s another great story about Joyce tourism involved here: briefly, I was approached following a panel at that 2004 Joyce conference in Dublin about which I’ve already spoken, by [...]
If Bloomsday had not existed, we would have had to invent it—as indeed, of course, we have. Ulysses is, amongst other things, and extraordinary difficult novel; modernism is a difficult art. Indeed, as Leonard Diepeveen argues so persuasively in his book The Difficulties of Modernism, it’s probably the first artistic movement to make difficulty a [...]