hello. long time no post. it's been busy. what is "it"? that's what i ask students in the writing lab. sometimes it's hard to tell. sometime it's the weather. it is raining. what is raining? it. it is raining. or, it has been raining here in san francisco. not hard but on and off for the last week or so. it's been cold for san francisco, dropping to the low forties at night and last week there was a few reports of a few flurries in noe valley. yours truly has been moderately warm, but it was an adjustment the first couple weeks of cold air and in addition to the feeling that i've become a weather wuss living in california. next monday i'll go to wisconsin to spend christmas with family where from what i'm told, there is a lot of snow and cold. i'm looking forward to it, for at the very least, when i get back here in late december it will feel warm.
it's been a pretty busy semester and even though i'm not going to apologize for not posting more frequently i just haven't had much time or impetus. maybe these are the waning days of this blog. maybe this will be the last post. no, but i've been busy with other things. what can i say. teaching has been relatively peaceful this semester, i've been out of town the last couple weekends seeing friends, i've also been working diligently on a kind of new manuscript for most of the semester that given the in-between semester time of january i should be able to finish and send out. i just killed a bug on my computer screen...it was about to be run over by these letters so i squashed it instead. i'm not proud of this.
over this last weekend i saw rosemary waldrop give the george oppen memorial lecture. it was fascinating! i've also been kind of morbidly fascinated by the tiger woods business, mostly because every day there is a new porn star or waitress claiming they were in love. there is a kind of interesting chit chat about the inner-lives of athletes in today's internet paper. but really, there is so much going on news wise with Afghanistan (i support more troops in the hopes of getting the Afgan government on their own feet. however, in the paper on sunday Scott Atran's dry but really interesting/helpful editorial suggests that doing less would actually do more. He writes: "In fact, it is the United States that holds today’s Taliban together." and goes on to explain this. Here is the full article.).
shamefully i admit that the nytimes is one of my only news sources asides from huffington post which i read during down time in the writing lab and the local daily and weekly newspapers here in san francisco. it's hard work to keep up on these things and if i didn't, well, i wouldn't. but i write shamefully, because yeah, the nytimes has its problems too. last week during the opening days of the Copenhagen talks when the authorities there seized a bunch of shields, steps, wirecutters (and other tools protesters were planning to use,) from a building that was specifically set aside by the authorities for the protesters to use, the times ran a picture of the stolen goods but said nothing more about it.
outside of mainstream media and whatever other tangent i was about to go off on, most of all, and the reason for writing this post, right now, today, is that i wanted to post a link to Jack Foley's radio show that he did last week about Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" (one of my favorite books). He did the show not about the movie that is has recently come out and gotten okay reviews, and i have not seen it and do not plan to, but about the book, specifically he does a Freudian analysis of it in a pretty interesting way, explains the Freudian concept of paranoia, and then read a couple passages. In a way it begins to address why popular culture is so obsessed with the end of the world these days. Here is the link, and by the way, I think it will expire in the next couple weeks so if you're interested don't delay. Have a good day and if I don't talk to you soon merry christmas or have good day off.
it's been a pretty busy semester and even though i'm not going to apologize for not posting more frequently i just haven't had much time or impetus. maybe these are the waning days of this blog. maybe this will be the last post. no, but i've been busy with other things. what can i say. teaching has been relatively peaceful this semester, i've been out of town the last couple weekends seeing friends, i've also been working diligently on a kind of new manuscript for most of the semester that given the in-between semester time of january i should be able to finish and send out. i just killed a bug on my computer screen...it was about to be run over by these letters so i squashed it instead. i'm not proud of this.
over this last weekend i saw rosemary waldrop give the george oppen memorial lecture. it was fascinating! i've also been kind of morbidly fascinated by the tiger woods business, mostly because every day there is a new porn star or waitress claiming they were in love. there is a kind of interesting chit chat about the inner-lives of athletes in today's internet paper. but really, there is so much going on news wise with Afghanistan (i support more troops in the hopes of getting the Afgan government on their own feet. however, in the paper on sunday Scott Atran's dry but really interesting/helpful editorial suggests that doing less would actually do more. He writes: "In fact, it is the United States that holds today’s Taliban together." and goes on to explain this. Here is the full article.).
shamefully i admit that the nytimes is one of my only news sources asides from huffington post which i read during down time in the writing lab and the local daily and weekly newspapers here in san francisco. it's hard work to keep up on these things and if i didn't, well, i wouldn't. but i write shamefully, because yeah, the nytimes has its problems too. last week during the opening days of the Copenhagen talks when the authorities there seized a bunch of shields, steps, wirecutters (and other tools protesters were planning to use,) from a building that was specifically set aside by the authorities for the protesters to use, the times ran a picture of the stolen goods but said nothing more about it.
outside of mainstream media and whatever other tangent i was about to go off on, most of all, and the reason for writing this post, right now, today, is that i wanted to post a link to Jack Foley's radio show that he did last week about Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" (one of my favorite books). He did the show not about the movie that is has recently come out and gotten okay reviews, and i have not seen it and do not plan to, but about the book, specifically he does a Freudian analysis of it in a pretty interesting way, explains the Freudian concept of paranoia, and then read a couple passages. In a way it begins to address why popular culture is so obsessed with the end of the world these days. Here is the link, and by the way, I think it will expire in the next couple weeks so if you're interested don't delay. Have a good day and if I don't talk to you soon merry christmas or have good day off.
