Author: Lee

Even as I imagine that my (eh, academic) interests are expanding into newer, hipper domains, I find myself always coming back to postirony. I purchased McSweeney’s #18 yesterday (as a reward for having sold at least a dozen books I would never read on Amazon.com Marketplace; trust me when I say I’ve never done anything … Continue reading Postirony’s Revenge

Even as I imagine that my (eh, academic) interests are expanding into newer, hipper domains, I find myself always coming back to postirony. I purchased McSweeney’s #18 yesterday (as a reward for having sold at least a dozen books I would never read on Amazon.com Marketplace; trust me when I say I’ve never done anything … Continue reading Postirony’s Revenge

I’ve volunteered to be on the admissions committee this year, and I’m really in the thick of it now. My own work has been put on hold for a week or so as I read through the last round of applications. Even within the last group there are sharp distinctions: those who are OK, those … Continue reading Application Mania

I attended a poetry reading by Bruce Andrews, one of the founding members of the language poetry movement (sometimes written as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E). Afterwards, I went to a dinner with him, my advisor, another graduate student, and a visiting scholar. I learned that, in addition to his years of poetry-writing, he had a career as a … Continue reading Public Intellectuals

I have been thinking a lot lately about the status of this blog in relation to my academic work. When I began this blog, I had the idea that it would be a nice way for me to formalize my note-taking process and create a space within which I could test out ideas before committing … Continue reading O Blog!

I link to this Guardian article by everyone’s favorite Slovenian lit. critic Slavoj Zizek. He here criticizes the representation of torture on 24., with a particular focus on Season 4. Now I have all sorts of problems with the representation of torture on the show, for any number of reasons, but Zizek does a disservice … Continue reading Himmlers of Hollywood

So my dissertation keeps changing shape and size. Based on the various critiques that I received at my colloquium, I have been thinking about whether or not the concept of “postirony” has enough in it to carry a whole dissertation. I mean, it seemed that I could do a very detail-level sort of analysis of … Continue reading Changes Keep Coming

I am back in the U.S. after a pretty cool–and rather sick–trip to Barcelona for the New Year, where they stuff their mouths with grapes in the seconds leading up to midnight. My colloquim went off pretty well, although every member of my committee had mutually irreconcilable advice on where I should take my dissertation. … Continue reading Transformations and Permutations

Tomorrow, my colloquium is being held. This is going to be the one and only time that the three members of my dissertation committee will be in the same room together. So I’m excited. I’m not, unlike the time directly before my orals, at all nervous. Tomorrow’s discussion will consist entirely of them talking about … Continue reading Tomorrow’s the Day

I was reading the Wiki entry for William Gibson, and I discovered at the end of the entry a link to the website /patternHunter [/ph]. If, like me, you have an obsession with really sophisticated science fiction and emerging techno-cultural patterns of change, this site is something like an endless feast of fun. I have … Continue reading /patternHunter [/ph]