Voting today in Chicago: no line at 10am at the St. Augustine College polling location in south Logan Square/north Humboldt Park--in fact, maybe 6 people voting, max, which is equal to or less than the number of poll-workers there. No older black women in tears about living to see the day. No college kids voting for the first time because now they ( Read more... )

I am, officially, unpleasable. I've been offered a lecturship next Spring for a class called "Science Fiction in the 19th Century," and I am not pleased. Perhaps because I threw together the syllabus in an afternoon, and will need to do some serious thinking to revise it. Perhaps because I wonder if the class will be under-enrolled or over-enrolled ( Read more... )

If my car starts up today, then the aggravation of trying to get my car to work last week was a fun little adventure; if my car doesn't start up, it was a tiny tragedy, like a pinhole stroke just wide enough to let slip through the one word you need. Until I go out and try it this morning, my quantum car, Schroedinger's car--neither alive nor dead ( Read more... )

What a difference a year makes--that's the phrase, right? I guess it does make a difference: last year at this time, I was a few hours away from my orals exam, about to spend a night where I thought my anxiety was going to kill me--just crush crush crush my heart. I wasn't consciously nervous; I was deeply calm, but in the way that I get deeply ( Read more... )

Today, while riding my bike from here to here (i.e., from home to school, which you might get a better sense of in this map), I had this conversation with myself, when I took a turn a little faster than I had planned:
Ben: "Too much, too much!"
Ben: "More!"

-William Gibson, "No Maps for these Territories" (2000 ( Read more... )

I am mostly settled into my new apartment in Logan Square -- 2022 N. Spaulding, Garden Apt, Chicago IL 60647 (for mix cds, and other things you want to send me) -- and so I decided to take pictures to show what the space is/the work in progress. On my flickr page there are several pictures: there's my living room (with table covered in all the ( Read more... )

I'm not all that clear what the lessons are that we can learn from the inverted world (except maybe that inversion is better than eversion -- it's generally better to be backwards than inside-out), or even where exactly the inverted world is (though rumor has it that it may be as close as the nearest mirror, or as far away as Cleveland ( Read more... )

I was just telling my occasional therapist how much I like reading out in the sun, by Promontory Point; and I was just writing an email telling someone how important sun-block is for surviving the summer.

Imagine then my delighted surprise when I just went to take notes on Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses (review soon to be up on ( Read more... )

Is it just me -- and just the weather in Chicago -- or has our imagination of disaster, our imagination of otherness turned towards cold? Is winter our vision of choice of an alien planet, or our vision of choice for the end of this one?

I was reading a review of Dan Simmons' new book, The Terror, about an arctic exploration gone wrong, and the ( Read more... )