December 2011
5 posts
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Finals week is jackrabbit country.
“People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity, and Craziness. But I have spent enough time in jackrabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are bored with their daily routines: eat, fuck, sleep, hop around a bush now & then….No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while;...
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George Whitman, Christopher Hitchens, and now Vaclav Havel. This was a good week for death. I would love to imagine (oh how Hitchens would hate it) that Dante was right, and that there is a tavern of virtuous pagans out there in which the discourse has just gotten a little more heated.
These deaths have left me thinking about the deaths (literal, not theoretical) of writers. Havel and...
7 tags
December, finals week. [or: it's not...
I’m wrapping up the semester and happened to notice something. The first poem my students and I read this year was Raymond Carver’s “Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year,” which begins:
“October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen I study my father’s embarrassed young man’s face. Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string of spiny...
8 tags
5 tags
The state of the semester and (by very ambitious...
Somehow, totally inexplicably, this is our last week of the semester. I would report this with total hysteria, except I’m very lucky to have students I will keep for the entire year. This makes the last week stressful for all sorts of housekeeping reasons, but at least there won’t be any goodbyes.
Tomorrow my students will submit their final paper, a study of some new technology that...
