My favorite part of last night’s American Literature lecture was talking about how Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative both reads us and revises earlier memoirs.
Read MoreIn Praise of Peer-Review
Can I just say that I love the peer-review process? Sure, it’s a bit cumbersome, and the timeline to publication rather long, but sometimes it’s enormously helpful.
Read MoreProgress Update: Children’s Books
A few years ago, I started writing children’s books about poets. My head is full of anecdotes from literary history that come up in lectures, and I started writing some of them down.
Read MoreThe Spasmodics’ Social Anxiety Salve
I’m presenting a paper at the Fall 2016 gathering of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) hosted by the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at ASU on the theme of “Social Victorians.”
Read MoreChurchill’s Largess
Only on chapter one, I’m already floored by the resourcefulness of the man, but also his principles. When coalminers staged a strike during his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he broke it by founding an anti-strikers newspaper. Then, after he’d won, he sided with the miners, steering through parliament a campaign for better wages and safety standards. Noblesse oblige.
Read MoreOn Trains
There are many ways America could achieve a respectable system in the immediate future. I’m not a student of governance, nor a policy wonk, but these seem to me the most pressing, workable solutions.
Read MoreAnother Victorian Vampire
I admire Elizabeth Barrett Browning immensely, but I’m tempted sometimes to classify her among the undead.
Read MoreOn McCracken on Malick
I said I liked this review by Brett McCracken of the new Terrence Malick film “Knight of Cups” and my friend, the artist David Wittig, asked why, so I thought I’d try to figure it out.
Read MoreRonson Review
I read this book by Jon Ronson because Austin Kleon told me to, and I basically do whatever he says.
Read MoreEugenia Leigh "Psalm 107"
Romanticism Pitch
I was thinking of a special topics class I could offer for graduating seniors in the in English Department here at Northwest University, and came up with the following, for which I mocked up this poster design.
Read MoreGirls are Strong
eople like this Paul Ford fellow, who wrote this otherwise excellent article about computer coding, are always holding up statistics like the following, presumably for our collective horror: “less than 30 percent of the people in computing are women.” We’re supposed to say: Can you imagine? That’s disgusting. etc. etc.
But man, 30%! That’s great!
Read MoreChesterton and the Local
In a typically delightful essay called “What I Found in my Pocket,” G.K. Chesterton refers to "municipal patriotism” as "perhaps the greatest hope of England” (91). By this curious phrase, he means not love of country per se, nor civic machinery as such, but something more like love of the neighborhood. An odd claim, don’t you think?
Read More“But compilers often do several passes, turning code into simpler code, then simpler code still, from Fitzgerald, to Hemingway, to Stephen King, to Stephenie Meyer, all the way down to Dan Brown, each phase getting less readable and more repetitive as you go.”
Romantics Class Recap: Faust 3
In class this week, we finished our reading of Faust, and buttressed our discussion thereof with a summary of sublime discourse from Longinus and Burke.
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It’s my birthday! So I treated myself to @wearemacphun #Tonality app and made this first B/W conversion. Here’s me in my favorite hat, in Rome’s #Pigneto neighborhood.
Peter Stark "Astoria"
I saw this book on the shelf at the Edmonds Bookshop on my bi-monthly trip to the seaside town for tea.
Read MoreOn Wheaton and Hawkins, by way of Percy Shelley
And now it’s the lead story over at The Chronicle of Higher Education. The new #Wheatongate continues apace and will likely continue so to do until the decision comes down from the Board of Trustees, at which point–whatever the decision–it will all flare up again until we find someone else’s business to be aghast over, or we forget. For the most part, I actually like this convtoversy for the level of conversation it has engendered.
Read MoreMusic/ 2015
Favorite records of 2015
Read MoreTeaching Cenci
I recently taught Shelley’s play The Cenci for this course at the University of Washington.
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