(embarassingly, cross-posted from Facebook) but it has been so long since I wrote here, I thought something was in order: so today I had to go to Amsterdam to get new pages put into my passport. Travelling back and forth between the UK filled it up in three years. Compared to what some people have to go though just to visit their families in the UK ( Read more... )

As ever, I am behind the times.  So I got back from a media history conference, a few weeks ago, only to discover that media history happened (as it does every day...) in my absence.  Walter Cronkite died.

His death did not hit me emotionally in the way that Jim Henson's did.  He was not for me the everyday personality that he was for many a ( Read more... )

Some days I feel like a motherless R A G E

So goes a line from Night Driving by David Thomas and Two Pale Boys.  To me  it  echoes not with Jonathan Lethem, but Marian Anderson,  her voice shaping that hole precisely and methodically, like a sharp chisel in soft wood.

My instruments are blunter.

It has been a frustrating couple of weeks.  My job talk ( Read more... )

One of the multiple paradoxes of America is that this nation in which church and state are officially separated, its political culture is more religious than any other place I have been.   Our best - and worst - political oratory stems directly from traditions perfected in the pulpit.  It seems almost fitting that the current rhetoric is all about ( Read more... )

Today was my last class with the group of Dutch students.  I will see them one more time, and some of them will come to see me in office hours, but this was the last 'teaching' I will do for them.  Like every other time, it did not go well.  I got a few points across, others went by the wayside between my inability to ask more concrete questions ( Read more... )

My compadre Raymond (also known as David) just posted on his blog his top 5 albums at the moment.  In an excercise in trying to gain my life back (I do not remember the last time I took a day off from work.  I think it might have been a Saturday about 4-5 weeks ago. I won't do it today, either, though I have wasted much of the morning)  I thought I ( Read more... )

I just got my California ballot today, so I can vote against prop 8. How bloody tedious.

Click to view

Click to view

We will return to regularly scheduled angst soon enough, but here, in the meantime is the latest video in the Wobbe Index and Bonsai Tree collaboration ( Read more... )

I don't often remember my dreams, and when I do, I am usually embarrassed by how totally cornball melodramatic they are. But every now and then I have a doozy that I remember (or rather I suspect I remember remembering it). Many years ago, when I was studying in hamburg for a year I had a bizarre and horrible series of dreams, all of which ( Read more... )

When it goes well, teaching is a buzz. When the faces light up, even one or two, or when things get a bit heated even. Few things are better ( Read more... )