[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 [...]
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 [...]
It’s a post for another day, but you should follow up on how “The Profession” looks from the inside. I’m interested in your thoughts, and those of your colleagues from different parts of The Profession. Thanks. I saved that comment from a couple of weeks ago, meaning to return to it; it’s a big question, [...]
Perhaps it’s because my editor daughter has been visiting for the past week, but I hear the Muse of Punctuation whispering in my ear. And a serendipitous encounter with a weird sign on Friday got me going. If I were a stand-up comic—well, I’d be broke, out of work, first off. But I might start [...]
My daughter Audrey was lucky enough to be in the audience for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last week. She would say the timing was lucky because she got to see Belle & Sebastian; Zzzzzz. AUDREY: Right. I guess the sublime beauty of Stuart’s voice and the witty poetry of their lyrics are a total [...]
I’ve written before about the music that can reduce one to tears—but honestly, I never had anything like this in mind. For those of you who don’t follow it religiously—and yes, I expect, there are one or two of you out there—well, Michael Bolton was unceremoniously dismissed from Dancing with the Stars last week. The [...]
I wonder if it’s fair to say that I’ve come now to believe that Coldplay writes some pretty majestic, stirring music—but bad songs? I wonder if that’s the distinction I was groping toward yesterday? To continue with that narrative, then: wanting a song to remind me of my baby, I went to A Rush of [...]
I write from the lovely Portland Marriott City Center, in downtown Portland, Oregon. $9.95, per day, for Internet access; I’m no math whiz, as a recent post embarrassingly demonstrated, but I think that works out to about $300 a month, plus tax—which strikes me as, what, a bit on the high side? And from the [...]
Back to the primal scene: the roads from Champaign, Illinois, to St. Louis, Missouri. Roads paved . . . with poetry. I don’t just mean the poetry at the end of the road, a dollop of T. S. Eliot at the end of the rainbow of St. Louis’s Gateway Arch: I’m talking about that quintessential [...]