When I went off to college to be an English major, my father (who passed last December at 90) told me a story about how his respected professor at Northwestern University spent a whole lecture on the seven levels of symbolism in Melville’s Moby-Dick. Being of an analytical mind and precise mind, my father copied…
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. @thepublicpgh
Inspiration can come to those with the humblest heart. Caedmon the Cowherd believed he had no talent for singing, but the voice in his dream encouraged him. Listen to what he does with it in, “The Cowherd Who Became a Poet,” by James Baldwin. A Production of We Are One Body® Audio Theatre. Read by…
In my lit classes, I’m definitely teaching more short stories and fewer novels that I used to. I’ve expanded the time I spend on note-taking, synthesizing quotes from different sources, and why at the college level it’s not a good paragraph if it simply introduces “One quote that supports my position,” repeats three or four…
This was before the printing press, so books were copied by hand on parchment, which made them expensive and rare. Most people didn’t read much, especially for pleasure. Instead, they listened to books at group readings for entertainment. Pero López de Ayala wrote at the end of the 14th century, “It also pleased me to…
Book historian Irene O’Daly notes that the passage crossed out in a medieval manuscript matches where the scribe accidentally turned two pages while copying out a printed book, showing that manuscript culture continued to exist even after the printing press was introduced. (It’s the third of three examples she uses.)
The host was Bill Moyers, former White House press secretary under Lyndon Johnson. The guest was August Wilson, one of the great playwrights of the 20th century and unofficial laureate of African American history and culture. It did not go well. “Don’t you grow weary of thinking Black, writing Black, being asked questions about Blacks?”…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Worf grumbles to Kira that Odo seems permissive about Quark’s shady doings. On a runabout, O’Brien stops himself just before saying he wishes Keiko were more like Bashir. Plot contrivance particles get the runabout crashed on a planet and the spacebros captured by Jem’Hadar ground forces before the opening credits roll. The leader…
Rewatching ST:DS9 On a dark and stormy night, a man gives himself an injection, and a rain-soaked young woman shows up at his door, on a quest to ask the famous writer Jake Sisko why he stopped writing years ago. We flash back to young Jake tagging along on the Defiant ostensibly to see a…
Carolyn was in this short movie, conceived and produced in 48 hours, executed in a single unbroken take (with mesmerizing camera motion). If you can spare about 8 minutes, I think you’ll enjoy what you see!
An amazing story of hope and dignity. That book club helped the inmates develop their analytical and communication skills. And out of that came a surprising insight: prison inmates read 9 times more books than civilians. So together with the National Justice Council, the Carambaia publishing house created a program called The Prison Reviews. The…
In August, 2002, I was blogging about Educational technology spending that doesn’t benefit students; ebook readers that students don’t like; email as a tool in online course (all free at the time, but now behind the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s paywall) A prof spreading bad papers in order to catch plagiarists Expensive goose tracker leads…
“I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies. Rutger Bregmen writes: “began to wonder: had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island?…
“Professing Criticism” proceeds on the basis that, in order to decipher the present and to prepare for the future, one must first turn to the past. “The study of literature—in the premodern sense of any writing that has been preserved or valued—is very old, the oldest kind of organized study in Western history, excepting only…
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the first talkie The Jazz Singer, the songs “Ol Man River” from Showboat and “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and the novels To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder) and the first Hardy Boys novel will (finally) enter the common domain in 2023. I chose my…
