It’s Valentines Day as I write this, which means it is again time for the publication of self-consciously provocative arguments against the existence of/feasibility of/compatibility with modern life of romantic love. I am not, at this stage in my life, particularly exercised about disputing them. I would just note two things. First, that my personal […]
Continue reading →Last week on Twitter, I shared a few excerpts from an assignment I had my freshman composition students do. In that in-class assignment, I had them rewrite sections of classic literature (once class got the opening to Moby Dick, the other the opening to A Tale of Two Cities) in the voice of another author or genre […]
Continue reading →I found out about this sad Damien Walker piece (edit: Walter, not Walker!) in the Guardian only via this wonderful piece by Lincoln Michel, and I suppose the real purpose of this post is to ask you to read Michel’s piece. It’s a sharp, data-driven look at why so many complaints about book culture, and so many of the claims […]
Continue reading →Obviously, I have a bunch of complaints about professional politics and culture writing. But one complaint I see floating around just doesn’t jibe with my experience at all. I frequently read people saying (often on Facebook) that “nobody knows how to write these days,” that the web writing generation doesn’t have the prose chops that […]
Continue reading →This piece on Graywolf Press is charming and sharp, but I leave it feeling even more sure that the “lyric essay” is not much of a definable thing. Any genre that could include Karl Ove Knausgaard and Joan Didion and John D’Agata and David Foster Wallace just can’t be much of a genre. It’s a genre […]
Continue reading →I want to be fair, here. I have been edited by some academic editors who have been judicious, wise, and seasoned. I also have been edited in a lot of popular press publications and I can tell you that a lot of editors out there are no peach to work with. Good editing is wonderful; good editing […]
Continue reading →In what I truly hope is the nadir of pop fans whining about the mere existence of people who don’t like what they like, Rob Harvilla deploys a tactic I’m seeing more and more of lately: preemptively acknowledging a broader controversy as a way to avoid having to comment on it, when the subject of […]
Continue reading →Last week I wrote a long post on what I see as a dangerous trend in my field’s focus, away from the traditional prose instruction that institutions and policymakers still see as valuable, and towards increasingly abstruse and disconnected subjects in critical pedagogy, pop culture, theory, and digital abstraction. I find these areas to be engaging and generative, […]
Continue reading →“…none of these directors has made a film that has the unadulterated momentum of District 9, which unfurls like an act of God.” – Kevin Lincoln, in a not-bad-at-all reconsidering of District 9. Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to write too-cute metaphors. Metaphors can go bad in one of two ways: they can be […]
Continue reading →Seriously: is there a more worthless cliche in our well-stocked bag of worthless cliches? It’s made a non-ironic comeback with The Interview and Charlie Hebdo, and it’s such a ponderous, self-important method for achieving profundity. It’s especially egregious given that the topic of terrorism would seem to have enough intrinsic seriousness that it doesn’t require that kind […]
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