Category: Debris
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If You Build It
The Metro Pulse features a short article this week about the need for a new and much larger library in downtown Knoxville. The unfolding of this project should prove interesting, as it will essentially ask city and county taxpayers how much they “value” the library. The elected decision-makers are already eyeing the $60 million facility recently completed in Nashville, which is a good thing, as far as I’m concerned.
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Liberalism and Literature
A comment left here on Wednesday by Daniel Green led me to his blog, which in turn led me to his wonderful article, “Liberalism and Literature.” A critique of the “academic left” and of ideological criticism, in general, Green’s piece is refreshingly articulate, well-informed, and even-handed.
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City Planning
I’m desperate for distractions right about now. (Note: writing a dissertation on Cold War literature does not qualify as an emotionally productive distraction from grief.) And I think I’ve found a good one.
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Shit Happens
I don’t get upset about things over which I have no control. I just don’t. It’s not in me.
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By the Numbers
I’ve been daydreaming lately about the upcoming Presidential debates, wondering if the eventual Democratic nominee will find the courage to really take Bush to task.
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A New Read
The New Pantagruel is a just-launched Web journal “run by a cadre of intemperate but friendly Catholics and Protestants.” If Stegall and his compatriots manage to achieve even half of the promise on display in his introductory comments, then I will be reading each quarter with great anticipation.
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Democracy in America
De Tocqueville is near the top of my “Darren, seriously, isn’t it about time that you read this?” list. I stumbled upon this passage while reading Wendy Brown’s Politics Out of History, a provocative defense of critical theory as a potentially invigorating voice in the discourse of liberal democracy.
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Feelin’ Crispy
I’m sympathizing right now with Clancy, who, a year-and-a-half into her doctoral work, asks, “Is this what burnout feels like? I have so much to do and no desire to engage any of it.”
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My First Block Quote of 2004
“All around the world there are those who believe in the basic goodness of the American people, who agonize with you in your pain, but also long to see your human goodness translated into a different, more compassionate way of relating with the rest of this bleeding planet.” — Bishop Peter Storey of South Africa
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Affluent Bias
In “Affluence Remakes the Newsroom,” Tim Rutten argues that contemporary journalism is dominated not by a liberal bias but by a “middle-class quietism that the majority of reporters and editors share with other Americans.”
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Changing How You See the World
Listen to Joe Wright’s commentary from tonight’s edition of All Things Considered. Joe’s a medical student at Harvard — 23 or 24 years old, I’d guess — and he already gets it.
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Moral Empathy
Jeffrey Alexander and Ron Eyerman published a great piece yesterday in Newsday (also available at Common Dreams), in which they argue that the massive economic and social changes necessary to alleviate suffering on a global scale are dependent, finally, upon change of a more fundamental and personal nature
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Evolution
If you’re interested in adding multiple style sheets to your site, do what I did: read Paul Sowden’s excellent tutorial, then rip off his script.
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A Note from Knoxville
Newsday posted a fun article yesterday about the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility. Of course, the word “fun” is totally relative when you’re talking about a two-acre plot of land where donated bodies decompose under the close scrutiny of forensic anthropologists.
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Heavy Industries
Y0ung-Hae Chang Heavy Industries Presents is just about the coolest damn Website I’ve found in months. Finally, someone is doing something original with Flash — and by “original” I mean a backward glance to early-Godard all jumbled together with politics and sex and Blue Note jazz.
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Cringe
So, today at lunch a co-worker was getting us all up to speed on the latest episode of Average Joe, and our conversation turned — inevitably, perhaps — to the sick pleasure we humans seem to take from experiencing others’ discomfort.
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Friday Colloquy
On Friday afternoon I subjected myself to ninety minutes of critical scrutiny by a group of professional historians. And it ended up being a damn good time.
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Stuck in the Long, Hard Slog
But wish as I might, I can’t yet join the knee-jerkers, and I’m not sure why, exactly. Except that I don’t want it all to have been for nothing.
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Ghosts, Goblins, etc.
Halloween is the highest of the holy days in Long Pauses land. My wife spends months planning her costume — this year she was Galadriel, I was Harold (from Harold and Maude).
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Survival Saturday
College football is the only sport capable of raising my heart rate these days.
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Bring ‘Em On
“When Bush landed on the aircraft carrier in that flight suit, I immediately thought, ‘From now on, just do Bush in the flight suit. Every single time.'”
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Writing a Dissertation
A diary of my week.
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World Enough, and Time
Some days I fantasize about giving up on this dissertation. Mostly I want my free time back. I want to walk into a library and choose a book that has nothing to do with Cold War history or American literature.
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Writing is Hard, Redux
The alarm went off a 5:45 this morning, and I got up. Lord help me. I actually got up.
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More on Teaching and Technology
I find myself stuck in an odd position: I want to be a classroom teacher, but the tight job market and the “business” of graduate teaching assistantships has left me working instead in Instructional Technology, a field about which I feel ambivalent, at best.
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A Few Good Reads
A few interesting education-related links passed through my desk today. The first is to “Rethinking Thinking” from the Christian Science Monitor, which attempts to look beyond the lip-service academics typically pay to the importance of “critical thinking.”
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Thanks for the Links
My host recently adjusted their Webstats software, so I’m now able to get better data about Long Pauses readers.
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This is Persecution?
So, while driving to and from Atlanta this week we heard two interviews with David Limbaugh, who is out promoting his latest book, Persecution: How Liberals are Waging War Against Christianity.
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Academic Blogs
I chased a link and ended up discovering a fascinating community of academic bloggers, most of whom are like me — insiders with an outsider’s (slightly disgruntled) perspective. If you’re considering graduate school, read the links on the right side of Invisible Adjunct before making any rash decision.
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Altruism?
The “business” of health care is beyond me. Which is why I don’t typically write about our need for something like socialized medicine. But that quote has stuck with me. In our money-saturated political discourse, caring about the health of our least advantaged citizens has become a question of “altruism.”