My head hurts. Or is it my stomach. Or is it some finely-tuned moral or cognitive or aesthetic sense situated somewhere between the two – somewhere mid-gullet, perhaps, or resting on the back of the third rib. Whatever it is, it comes of reading this. What is it that’s so irritating about this…

The Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s led some of us to believe that the end of the canon, the end of seemingly objective appraisals of “aesthetic complexity” through close readings, the end of the representation of the culture of white males as culture per se, meant that some major battles in the politics of representation had been won. Some scholars however, suspected that the

Maybe – as a lot of people have said – it’s not such a bad thing that Ratzinger is pope. Maybe we should all be rejoicing, and singing Te Deums and lighting candles and pretending to see baby Jesus on our pizza. Maybe he’ll wake a few dozy people up to what the Catholic church is and what it’s for and what it’s about. It’s not a pretty silk brocade and red velvet backdrop for a sweet old guy who wanders the globe ‘blessing’ people, and it’s not the best place to look for social justice or equality or critical thinking or – much of anything good, really. At least nothing that I can think of. Just ask anyone who … Read the rest

Joseph Epstein has a rather irritating review of Elaine Showalter’s new book on the academic novel. I don’t like Epstein’s writing much. It’s rather stale and uninspired and labored, I think.

The closest thing we have to these ideal anthropologists have been novelists writing academic novels, and their lucubrations, while not as precise as one would like on the reasons for the unhappiness of academics, do show a strong and continuing propensity on the part of academics intrepidly to make the worst of what ought to be a perfectly delightful situation.

Lucubrations. Perfectly delightful. Propensity. Intrepidly. Yawn. Yawn, yawn, yawn. About as fresh as last week’s oatmeal.

And in this review he says silly and very banal and untrue things … Read the rest

Don’t I feel stupid. Sometimes I miss comments here. I don’t have one of them there RSS things, so no little bell goes off, no stoat leaps out of a hole in the corner of the screen, no spark ignites a small charge of powder to explode the ‘k’ key and get my attention. In short, nothing alerts me that a new comment has been posted, and so…if some days have passed…and I’ve forgotten what number they were on…then I overlook them. I feel guilty sometimes, as if I’ve been snubbing people, or ignoring them when they say something interesting. And I miss good stuff, too. I should get one of them there RSS things, I suppose. But I’ve been … Read the rest