Last time on this space, I was writing about the somewhat surreal experience of reading through my Facebook Friendz recommendations, carefully. Some things just aren’t meant to be read carefully: Paul Ryan’s Republican budget proposal, for instance; FB Friendz recommendations. That notwithstanding—I did. And, of course, I took a pass on nearly all of them. [...]
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Kevin
Like anyone who has a Facebook account, I get e-mails occasionally telling me that someone or other wants to be “friends.” I’m normally pretty accommodating, I think; though like most thoughtful people, I resist the idea that these shared data streams actually constitute friendships. I could write the rest of this post putting the terms [...]
My students had read, and we’d all fruitfully discussed, Carl Wilson’s 33 1/3 book on Celine Dion: so far, so good. We were sauntering through the subsequent reading and writing assignments (and yes, in response to those comments: I’ll post the syllabus sometime soon, but I think I’d like to finish the semester first, and [...]
It’s been so long since I posted, I hardly remember how. If John Lennon were still with us, I think he’d say that blog silence is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans. But at lunch today with a friend, I told a story that I realized might be of interest to [...]
They say a picture is worth a thousand words; so what would a picture of words be worth? I know, I know: it’s like a Zen koan. But this is where the saga of Kevin’s iPad stands as of today. I spent a long time in an Internet chat again yesterday with a customer service [...]
I promised at the end of Friday’s post to write today about my new iPad 2. That post would, I’m afraid, be rather short: in effect, I didn’t get my damned iPad, thank you very much. Were it not for natural and imminent nuclear disaster in Japan, political instability in Libya, and political insanity in [...]
Asleep at the wheel again, dear friends: well, not exactly that, but slacking nonetheless. I flew out early Wednesday morning for two days of meetings at MLA HQ in NY, which meant that Tuesday was a hot mess of crazy getting ready, and I’ve been running pretty hard since I got here. Meanwhile, the e-mails [...]
This is really going to test my 45-minute resolve: but I’ve just set a timer for 45 mins. The problem today isn’t finding 45 mins. to write: that’s a problem every day. No, the problem today is the topic’s both too big and too stale to handle properly in 45 mins. So here I go. [...]
I’m foolish, suppose, for letting it get to me. One Peter Wood had a piece in Wednesday’s Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Lily Bart vs. Lady Gaga.” The title should have been warning enough. For if you were innocently to ask, “Who’s Lily Bart?”, you would thereby have proven Wood’s point for him before he’d [...]
For the last two days, I’ve been trying to think about the benefits and drawbacks of various, let’s say sizes, of writing. Among the various sizes of canvas I use on a regular basis, a blog post falls right about in the middle: longer that a Tweet, longer than most memos or e-mails (“business” genres [...]