Category: literature

• Project Blog It: Red

  Dec 23

  Better red than dead. We’ve been watching the film version of Angels in America slowly over the past few weeks after recording it off Logo. It’s so dense, tightly woven,… more ›

• Academic Pro-/Mastur-bation

  Dec 9

  Only two classes down. But for the third class, I already have an incomplete/extension. So, for the most part, I’m done with the semester. Done with coursework altogether. Not counting,… more ›

• Project Blog It: “Love is an art…

  Sep 28

  … you learn degree by degree.” Love is artifice, a construction. It is μίμησις; ποιέσις. It is, what Heidegger calls in “Die Frage nach der Technik” the “irruption of the… more ›

• Antisocial Network

  Jul 22

  What can the word “friend” mean after Facebook, where it is really a synonym for “coincidence”? Verlyn Klinkenborg’s recent editorial in the New York Times is necessary brilliance and should… more ›

• Nothing Worth Knowing

  Jul 8

  When you’ve been in school for as long as I have, you reach a certain point—especially after a few years of teaching—when you realize that the majority of your own… more ›

• Tiananmen

  Jun 4

  I was in Beijing just a few days after the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. It was still closed to the public for “renovation,” in anticipation of protests… more ›

• the grandeurs of risk

  Mar 9

  I’m convinced that such a circle [that is, the unclosable circle of an encounter, which revolves around the undesirable] only exhausts the strength of those who don’t enter into it… more ›

• 15 Songs for a Solstice

  Dec 22

  …to help keep the cold in on the first day of winter. (As if most of us needed help with that.) Here’s to a new season of personal (and universal)… more ›

• Excerpts

  Dec 16

  Something I’ve been doing for the past several semesters is offering excerpts of my academic work here at the end of the semester. When I’m not writing here–which is happening… more ›

• Bullet-Point Friday

  Nov 16

  Thumb drive? Check. I do, after all, need to record the grades of the precious students enrolled in the US history course I TA for. Stack of history quizzes? Check.… more ›