By05.18.2013Critics have long held that, even if Cervantes was at least somewhat aware that his work would be successful, this was only because he knew it was funny, and hoped that, in reading it, as he famously wrote in his first preface to Don Quixote, "the melancholy would be moved to laughter, and the merry made merrier still."
Conversations
By04.05.2013This post could also be called: Walter Benjamin in the Age of Me Noodling Around with Small Data.
By03.21.2013No, she insisted, she could never go back to Zanesville. Of course, she would continue to visit her hometown but she would not live there again. My student’s words were adamant but her voice broke with undisguised sadness.
By03.30.2013Arabic poetics - the theories of criticism of poetry and eloquence in classical (mediaeval) Arabic scholarship - has a great deal to offer the contemporary reader and critic. This post is an iterative and discursive bibliography,
By01.28.2013In Gawker's, wry estimation, most of the U.S. simply didn't "get" Richard Blanco's inaugural poem "One Today." In the Washington Post's absurd trollgazing account, Blanco's poem merely signals the "death of poetry."
By09.19.2012“In order to transform publishing into a less crisis-bound, short-term-oriented system, we must end capitalism,” according to Andrew Goldstone’s – and my – friend, Colin Gillis, a member of the staff collective at the radical co-op, Rainbow Bookstore, located in Madison, WI.
By07.26.2012Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) is a towering figure in Central and East European literary history. You'll find monuments to him in three national capitals--Warsaw, Minsk, and Vilnius--as well as the Ukrainian city of Lviv. In Krakow, he's buried in the Wawel, alongside Polish kings. Haven't heard of him? Me neither, not till long after I finished my Ph.D.
By08.06.2012Forget Simone De Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, and Naomi Wolf. Descartes gave us all that we needed to claim gender equality a long time ago.
By05.30.2012To read Wilfred Owen as anything other than an English war poet might seem like sheer, anachronistic willfulness.
By11.21.2011"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street," composed in 1853, is perhaps Herman Melville's most famous short story. It's certainly his most inscrutable.
By05.05.2013In 1946 Albert Camus traveled to South America. During this journey, he took random notes published posthumously, in which he produced irregular (and sometimes brutal) remarks on both cities visited and on persons he met.
By04.22.2013One week after the bombings in Boston and I still feel the urge to write about this so much.
By04.15.2013Two summers ago, my family and I decided to spend an afternoon at Lisbon's Jardim Zoológico. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that our eldest daughter made the decision to go and wouldn't relent until we took her there.
By03.12.2013In its March 2013 issue, The Atlantic ran a tersely titled article, “Anthropology, Inc.” The author, Graeme Wood, spoke about a market research company (ReD) that was hiring anthropology PhDs to use their training in social science field work to dreg up data closer to home—in fact, in the home itself.
By09.10.2012One of the things I most cherish about having an interdisciplinary practice is the opportunity to think about how ideas from one context can enhance another. I spent the past week on a residency at Mount Tremper Arts for iLAND (Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature, and Dance), as part of a collaboration called Fieldwork: Seed Dispersal with Jan Mun and Emily Drury, which investigates relationships between the migration of seeds and of people.
By08.31.2012Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces (1998) has been sitting in one of my bookcases since 2000. I bought the postcard-sized Semiotext(e) book mostly out of surprise from seeing the name of its author in print: one I realized I hadn’t seen for a very long time and which I didn’t associate with fiction.
By06.30.2012Is there anyone else out there who wonders what’s going on with copy-editing? Or should I say copyediting?
By06.04.2012The New Yorker just released its first special issue devoted to science fiction, including contributions from genre giants like Ursula K. Le Guin and Ray Bradbury as well as rising "literary fiction" stars like Junot Díaz and Karen Russell.
