My apologies again, faithful readers: not the 24 hours I’d promised I’d keep you waiting, but quite a few more. My “technological problems” boil down really to a new installation of Windows 7 on my College laptop—and its seeming unwillingness, now, to do most anything I ask of it when I’m working at home. I [...]
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 [...]
So, I’ve noticed something in the conversations of my students and my hipper colleagues, over about the past year I’d say. As a part of speech, “so” most commonly acts as an adverb, and often as an intensifier—”He’s so good looking!” It’s much less frequently found at the start of a sentence, especially in formal [...]
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 [...]
OK, so this has been building up for a while; and rather than lurking around all snippy and defensive in the Comments section, really I need to mount a more thoughtful, and measured, response to this whole topic. And the topic, of course, is the charge that I “over-analyze” things. I’d like to begin by [...]
One of the categories on fcrp is the somewhat open-ended “The Writing Life,” and today’s post falls squarely in that vague territory. If one were less charitably disposes toward me than I am myself, it might be filed under “Andy Rooney”—you remember, the guy who closed weekly installments of 60 Mintues with his trademark “Did [...]
So I’ve been doing some background research for my current project, and the book I just finished reading puts into painful relief just what it is I hate about so much academic prose. I don’t want to name the book, because I’m not particularly interested in criticizing it, or its authors in particular (it’s a [...]
The following headline appeared last Friday in the U.K. newspaper, The Guardian: “Historian Orlando Figes Agrees to Pay Damages for Fake Reviews.” I don’t exactly have a Google alert set for the word “fake”—my inbox would be deluged every night, I fear—but this item did, for obvious reasons, catch my eye, and my interest. Turns [...]
Loved Ones, It had to happen: I’m not sure why today was the day. I had a strong feeling it was going to be sometime last week. But after 148 posts, 146 consecutive days: I’m taking this one off. I’ll renew my vow, here and now, to post very frequently to fcrp: at least every [...]