Long Pauses

Tag: Academia

  • No Reservations

    I read a book last weekend. A 302-page book. I was standing in Borders on Friday night, waiting for Joanna to get a drink, and I picked up a book, read the first few pages, and decided to buy it. Then I went home and finished it in three or four sittings.

  • How ‘Bout That

    How’s that for the perfect end to my academic career? I got a good note in The Times Literary Supplement!

  • An Important Announcement

    On May 1st, just a few days after Joanna and I return from our trip to London, I will begin a full-time job as a web designer at the university, and I’m damn eager to get started. I’m especially excited about my new title: Artist.

  • Catching Up

    While sipping my second glass of wine, I did my best to affect the look of someone waiting for that old friend I had arranged to meet — you know, staring intently across the room, even rocking forward onto my toes from time to time for a better vantage — but apparently I failed miserably.

  • Still Thinking Randomly

    Instead, I’m working on another conference paper — this one to be delivered next month in Atlanta, which is an easy drive, and thank God for that.

  • New Perspectives

    So, this is kind of exciting. My copy of Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author just arrived, hot off the proverbial press. My article, “The ‘Written World’ of Philip Roth’s Nonfiction,” is the 17th and final chapter in what I believe is the first book-length study of Roth’s entire body of work, up to and including The Plot Against America. Pretty cool. My first book chapter.

  • Usable Questions

    While flipping through the pages of College English in search of an early Frederic Jameson article, I found and photocopied a two-page piece by Ira Shor, which I’ve transcribed below.

  • Talkin’ About Movies

    Talkin’ About Movies

    Last night I delivered the following talk at the 2004 NEXUS Interdisciplinary Symposium: Reconstructing Theory and Value.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.”

  • The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology

    I am of two minds about The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. The argument that Alexander and Philip Smith lay out in Chapter 1 is intriguing, and Alexander’s application of it in his readings of the Holocaust and Watergate are refreshingly useful. The rest, to be perfectly frank, feels a bit like filler.

  • 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

  • Speaking of Gobbledygook

    Today, after tracking down the last of those elusive Philip Roth essays, I gave into my craving and checked out Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, a new collection of essays edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. According to the jacket copy.

  • 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.

  • Writing a Dissertation

    A diary of my week.

  • 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.

  • 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.”

  • 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.

  • Edward Said

    Edward Said, who seemed to devote his life to the greying of a world that many would like to keep black and white, has passed away at the age of 67 from pancreatic cancer.

  • God and the Machine

    Today’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education features an interview with Alan Lightman, a professor of physics and the humanities at M.I.T. Lightman recently edited a collection of essays, Living With the Genie, in which various authors examine the effects of technology (both good and bad) on our lives.

  • Speaking of Blogs

    I spent Thursday afternoon with UT law professor, Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. Instapundit), and thirty or so other faculty and staff in a discussion of blogging and its potential impact on academic life.

  • Dreaming of a 28 Hour Day

    I hadn’t planned to take a four day break from blogging, but life — as it’s wont to do — keeps getting in the way. And by “life” I mostly mean Sobig viruses, network flubs, and frustrated faculty, all of which have conspired this week to make my day job unusually exhausting.

  • And In University News . . .

    It’s a small blogoshpere after all. Thanks to this week’s cover story in the Metro Pulse, I’ve discovered that Instapundit (a.k.a. Glenn Reynolds), one of the world’s pioneer and most heavily-trafficed bloggers, spends his days in an office just a few yards from my own.

  • A Working Outline

    Working from the assumption that someone out there might actually care, here is my first shot at a rough dissertation outline.

  • Hauerwas, Bush, and Alexander

    After listening to me ramble incessantly, a professor recently pointed me toward Stanley Hauerwas. I now see why.

  • Film Trip

    Film Trip

    I spent the weekend in Annapolis with my folks. By coincidence, I was there while the Annapolis Chorale was staging Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, accompanied by a stunning 35 mm print of The Passion of Joan of Arc.

  • Could You Define Post-Secularism?

    In the same way that postmodernism has always been a really problematic and contentious term, post-secular is just another attempt to fix a label on the questions that plague a particular era.

  • Post-Secularism

    We spent the next 45 minutes discussing the growing interest (academic interest no less) in post-secularism, one of the many -isms vying for a prominent position in our post-postmodern age (if such jargon is even worth using)

  • Miscellaneous Debris

    Four random but interesting links.