(Crossposted at Arcade.) I’d like to use my bloggy pulpit to draw your attention to a draft of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s essay, “Infinite Summer: Reading the Social Network,” which discusses the origin and signifiance of an online effort to read Infinite Jest the summer after David Foster Wallace’s suicide. This essay is destined to become part […]

(Crossposted at Arcade.) In the spirit of continuing the conversation we have been having on Arcade about Stanley Fish, the recent axing of French, Italian, classics, Russian, and theatre at SUNY Albany, and the future of the humanities, I’d like to present this video (h/t Mark Vega). This is a video created using "xtranormal," a […]

My satirical political novel "Pop Apocalypse" presents a future world in which the U.S. goes on an invasion spree around the world. Among other places, I had my fictional U.S. invade Iceland. It seemed like a great gag: Why would the U.S. want to invade a tiny country of 250,000 people in the Arctic Circle […]

It has taken a while, largely due to my laziness, but I’ve finally found a way to restore the blog postings that got lost in the shuffle when my site was hacked back around December. Their formatting’s a bit wonky, but the old posts are back. Enjoy.

(Crossposted at Arcade.) At the risk of self-contradiction, I want to draw attention to a recent "Room for Debate" in the New York Times. Gathering together a number of critics, including Stanford’s very own Blakey Vermeule, the Times asks:  A recent Times article described the use of neurological research and cognitive science in the field […]

(Crossposted at Arcade.) Is it possible to organize departments of literature, culture, or humanistic study without norms, or around “the general norm that there are no norms,” as Meredith Ramirez Talusan suggests in a provocative Arcade comment? If it were possible, would such an approach be desirable? Should we replace questions of the form “Does this […]

(Crossposted at Arcade.) Continuing my progressive descent into vulgar materialism (I use the words "progressive" and "vulgar" in positive senses!), I’d like to continue the line of thinking of my previous post, "Reading under Neoliberalism." I will use the questions Joel Burges asks in a comment to guide my reflections here. His questions are too […]

(Crossposted at Arcade.) I remember hearing once that FBI agents who had wiretaps on various mafia operations noted a change in the speaking style of the gangsters they were monitoring after Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather was released in 1972.  The real gangsters began imitating the patois of their film counterparts, thoroughly identifying with their brutal ethos.  […]

I’ve managed to import my old blogger postings to WordPress, but I still can’t quite import my XML export file containing everything I’ve written since I switched to this site.  I hope to resolve this problem shortly, and restore all the shiny design elements while I’m at it.