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 [...]
Sometimes my own naiveté catches me by surprise and sends me staggering. How did I survive lo these five decades without knowing there’s an entire genre of photography, both still and moving, dedicated to “moms” fondling “guns”? Just look at the videos that crop up in the right margin of today’s YouTube selection: “Mom Shooting [...]
[Thanks to fcrp reader and my buddy Michael Coyle for the link for today’s post.] I’ve come to think of it as a fundamental human characteristic, though perhaps it’s primarily an American trait: we’ve got to believe that we’re unique, different, special. “I wish I was special / You’re so fuckin’ special,” as The Man sez. [...]
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 [...]
My thesis, in yesterday’s post, was that Twitter and Facebook together have made attending a conference a lot richer, and a lot more complicated. Which are perhaps two ways of saying the same thing. Richer (cont.): I’m sure all of this—the invasion of conferences by Twitter and Facebook—isn’t news to many of you; I’m sure [...]
Those headphones on our students bother teachers because they seem to symbolize a voluntary deafness and a concomitant isolation. Allan Bloom put it most memorably, if artlessly, when he complained in The Closing of the American Mind that “as long as they [our students] have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition [...]