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I spent part of my snow days working through A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. (Okay, I also read Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star again, but I’ve already made my Bolaño bromance loud and clear.) All I can say about the Literary History is: what an odd book! Who [...]

This is me being lazy: taking posts that I never finished and dropping the rough draft on my blog just to have an “update.” Whatever works.
It might be starting to seem more like a crush than a mild obsession with a modern writer, but damn I’m in awe of Roberto Bolaño. First I sent off [...]

I wanted to write a post about the odd headlines that seem to be appearing on news websites lately. My favorite was “Boyz II Men Singer Gets H1N1 Virus,” but that was nearly defeated by “Cat Catches H1N1.” (Yes, each of these made it into the “Most Important Stories” section of CNN. Thank God we’re [...]

Okay, I need to take a few posts and think about the recent books I have read. This afternoon I “finished” Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Yeah, it doesn’t sound very exciting, but her novel Gilead was truly beautiful. I put finished in quotes because I have to admit that I skimmed the final third because [...]

Rarely do I read a children’s book that I instantly love. I can be a bit of an English snob, and a clanging rhyme or forced rhythm can turn me against an author, as I think  ”C’mon, the books are only twenty pages long–can’t you at least craft a competent poem?” So how surprised was [...]

It’s a beautiful day but also a bit of a blah Monday. Lots of causes—end of a fabulous weekend, annoying politics on Facebook, painfully sad e-mail from the parent of a kind student, frustration of entering a mound of 0% scores due to missing papers. But it’s also due to a book I read yesterday [...]

I read an interesting article at TheAmericanScholar.org called “The Decline of the English Department” and I sadly found myself cheering along a bit. The big picture is this: from 1970 to 2003, English as a college major dropped from from 7.6 percent of all majors to 3.9 percent.
Now I do have a two questions about [...]

For no reason at all, the twelve non-religious texts that make me cower in awe, aware that I’m in the presence of a mind vastly greater than my own:

Aeschylus, Agamemnon (458 BC)
Virgil, Georgics (29 BC)
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (1321)
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605)
John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays (1842)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the [...]

I spent part of the last week returning to one of my favorite authors, Hermann Hesse. There are probably only four prolific authors where I can say, ”I think I’ve read almost everything they have written”: Fyodor Dostoevsky, John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac,  and Herman Hesse. His earnest mix of logic and mysticism always connects with me.
This [...]

Here’s a post that will call me out as an English teacher! Molly and I both have jobs that offer little in the way of interesting benefits. Yeah, we get health care and two trips to the dentist a year, and she actually got free business cards for the first time this summer, but that’s [...]