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 [...]
I had a wonderful discussion with my “Literary Interpretation” students last week, about the detritus that is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. My friend Paul Saint-Amour has written about the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses as a kind of test case for fair use, testing the boundaries of copyright; many [...]
I closed yesterday by saying I’d draw on some personal experience to try to flesh out the complexities of the Figes “fake reviews” scandal: his “praising his own work and rubbishing that of his rivals,” in the memorable words of The Guardian. I am, by training, a scholar of British & Irish literary modernism, and [...]
[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 [...]
Five more kvetches about Kakutani’s style of literary criticism and we’re done, boys & girls. Hold on tight. The first I sort of mentioned in the very first post, and it’s implicit in much of what I’ve written already: to wit, she (#6) too much enjoys delivering the jeremiad. As Neil Innes sings in his [...]