Today’s the first day of classes back here at Pomona College, and I’ve been struck–heartened, embarrassed, surprised, flummoxed–by the number of students, faculty, staff (even parents) who have asked me about the blog. “Is it dead?” “Are you going to start again?” Certainly when I wrote my last post back in April, I had no [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
So: Tweet < Facebook status update < Blog post < Magazine column < Journal article/Book chapter < Book I was thinking yesterday in terms of four or perhaps five different-sized portholes through which one peers out at the world, and the four or five writing genres to which they’re attached; today, I’m thinking it’s more [...]
I know, I know: on-again, off-again: worse than Oprah’s engagement(s). I’m sorry. I had decided about three weeks ago that the jig was up: I wasn’t having any success carving out time to write, and I was depressed about my lack of success. So that, in my head at least, I started writing The Last [...]
California State University Northridge math professor Tihomir Petrov was arraigned last Thursday for urinating on the office door of a math-department colleague. Yes, that’s right: there really are security cameras everywhere. And yes, the dude must have been really “pissed.” Surely “colleague” doesn’t quite capture the tenor of the relationship, one imagines; if we can [...]
Here, without further ado, three more quick examples of the zen-like genre of blog spam. With every little thing that seems to be developing within this particular subject matter, a significant percentage of opinions tend to be very exciting. Even so, I appologize, but I do not give credence to your entire strategy, all be [...]
It occurs to me that one of the sublime pleasures of maintaining a blog—one to which I’m privy, and you, Dear Reader, ordinarily are not—is reading the wonderful messages caught by WordPress’s steel-trap spam filter. Much of it is beneath notice—unvarnished attempts to put a URL into the comments section, for instance, thereby driving up [...]
Let me begin by thanking my colleagues Rosemary Feal (Executive Director of the MLA), Professor Erin Templeton, and Chronicle of Higher Education writer Jennifer Howard for correcting my error: the Los Angeles Times did run one feature story on the recent MLA Convention last week, focusing on the role of the humanities, and the job [...]