Weird war marketing. I just got an email from Virgin Atlantic Airways plugging companion fares on trips to the UK: “Take your closest ally to visit America’s closest ally.”
Throughout the war in Iraq, George Bush has seemingly upheld his reputation for being impervious to doubt. Never did we see him or hear him reported to be troubled by reports of American casulaties, dead Iraqi civilians, or mass destruction. Only once did I see any report that he was disturbed by anything. And what, amidst all this death, moved…
If, God forbid, any of you should find yourselves in Palo Alto tomorrow night with nothing to do, I’m doing a reading at 6:30 pm here at Stanford. The reading’s in the English Department’s Terrace Room, which is Building 460, Room 426. It’s an unusual lineup–all of the readers are English Ph.D. students: Ian Bickford, Noam Cohen, Joann Kleinneiur, Michelle…
First we had a “rolling start”; then a “rolling victory.” Now, it seems, we have a “rolling dialogue.” I imagine “rolling freedom” and “rolling democracy” are close behind. What all this suggests, of course, is that we are really engaged in a “rolling war,” one with no beginning, no end, no boundaries; it also means that terms like “victory” and…
Is the war over? Wow. Here’s how I get my news these days: I go to Jim’s blog and find him writing, “If this war is truly over…”–of course with one more dig at Barrett Watten. Huh? So I swallow my pride and pull up CNN.com, which is advertising “FALL OF SADDAM.” Of course, I don’t trust CNN, so I…
Just printing out some flyers for the Stanford Workshop on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, which I’m helping to coordinate this year. It’s a great gig–we get money from the Stanford Humanities Center and use it to sponsor a series of talks, readings, and workshop presentations, about evenly divided between faculty presentations, graduate student presentations, and readings and talks by visiting…
Coincidence, I think, but Eileen Tabios posted a review of her own today–in this case, of an art exhibit, but I’m impressed at the registers the review moves through, from personal reflection to close reading to art-historical context. Keep it coming, all…
Jordan Davis posted a few welcome links to recommended poetry review sources. The Boston Review does give me occasional hope for the future of civilization–it’s a vital illustration of the potential interface between left politics and experimental writing.
Confessions of my bourgeois reading habits (1): Every time I read a review by Alex Ross, the New Yorker’s classical music critic, I feel like I need to catch the next plane to New York to catch whatever performance he’s talking about, or run to the local record store to buy the complete works of, say, John Adams (which I…
Jonathan Culler gave a lecture at Stanford on Wednesday, during which he quipped that he was planning to follow the lead of Congress and start referring to French theory as “freedom theory.” Culler’s lecture, sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Novel, focused on narratology, and Culler spent the latter part of the lecture discussing Monika Fludernik’s book…