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 [...]
With real regret I bid farewell Tuesday to my senior seminar students in “Irony in the Public Sphere.” They were a great class; the topic as I conceived it is a big, baggy one (which goes some way to explaining why the book is taking me so long to finish), and the students took my [...]
[It's late Thursday, and tomorrow's post should be a Mystery Science Auditorium post; and ordinarily, I don't post until 5:00 a.m. PST. But I have exciting news today, big enough to break both of those self-imposed rules, just this once. So here's Friday's post, on Thursday night.] For reasons both professional and personal, it’s a [...]
Last week I was invited, along with a philosopher and a sociologist, to participate in a roundtable on campus on the status of the intellectual in contemporary culture. Actually, the focus of the debate was supposed to be “intellectualism,” which struck me as a somewhat loaded term, hence one I sort of quarreled with and [...]
Brooklyn’s in the house! A shout-out to my family and friends in the 718: Audrey & Sam, Shannon, Jonathan. As they all well know, there’s a musical renaissance in full swing in Brooklyn: TV on the Radio, Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear, Yeasayer, The National. I can’t believe there’s not a Twitter list yet. (And if [...]
I’ve had a few inquiries, and the blog advice books all say that in the early going here, I ought to say A Little Something About Myself. So here goes. A picture is probably in order, though all I’ve got to hand right now is my formal school portrait: I’ll try to get something a [...]
Monday brought the news that the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin has acquired the papers, and a selection of the library, belonging to the late David Foster Wallace. David was on the faculty of Pomona College, where I teach, from 2002 until his death in the fall of [...]
So, it’s high time to bring this unpremeditated mini-thread on rock cover versions to a close—or at least to put it on pause for awhile. Hoping to make this all a bit more interactive, I thought I’d post my list of Top 10 covers, and invite y’all to post yours—or even individual entries—in Comments. I’m [...]