In his new book The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform Resistance in the American University, Louis Menand discusses the concept of interdisciplinarity and the anxiety it arouses among academics. At one point he approaches this anxiety through a look at the anxiety that arose among artists in the 1960s, whose approach to creating art as well [...]
I apologize for the lack of Friday feature posts of late. I keep attempting to revisit Margaret Young’s novel Salvador again and failing to say what I want to say. Plus life has intervened of late. I still have hopes of saying something more about Salvador, but meanwhile: here’s a quote from Low’s Alan Sparhawk:
Sparhawk [...]
Warning: Spoilers ahead! Also, a long post.
I’ve been reading Shannon Hale’s YA novels to my daughter, now 13, for four years. The Books of Bayern are wonderfully emotionally textured, edgy enough to challenge my daughter, and filled with lots of girl power to encourage her to consider her options. Hale’s attention to language attracts my [...]
Several months ago I was working through in my mind a project I was writing for my friend Danor Gerald and Jaclyn Hales. Danor and Jaclyn are very talented actors and I was hoping to design a show especially geared towards their particular talents. I originally was thinking of a one man show for Danor, [...]
Last night I was reading the second chapter of Seth Lerer’s Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Amazon), and was struck by a phrase from Archbishop Wulfstan’s 1014 sermon Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, a phrase that Lerer calls “as powerfully alliterative as anything in poetry” (35): “Ac worhtan lust us to lage” (or [...]
Some time ago, I started following John Granger’s Twilight studies blog, “Forks High School Professor” as a corollary to my own academic interest in Meyer’s books. Granger made a name for himself as Dean of Harry Potter Studies when he took J.K. Rowling’s books as subjects worthy of academic study. And now he’s trying his [...]
Many thanks to Mark Athitakis (@mathitak) of American Fiction Notes for bringing to my attention an excellent commentary on the contemporary American short story by John Barry at City Pages. In his commentary “Dead End: Has a single James Joyce short story unduly influenced contemporary American short fiction?,” Barry complains that American short story writers [...]
About a decade ago I read an essay on the modern artist Wayne Thiebaud which talked about the communal aspects of his work. The essay attributed these aspects of his work to the communal aspects of his youth, from his birth in a Mesa, Arizona LDS community. Of course there are many communal aspects to [...]