13 ways of looking down

Review of the bliterature

2007-12-18T00:56:31Z

I decided to try a new public forum this summer; it got briefly off the ground, but didn't move much beyond the prototype stage. I like the varying privacy levels here, and without any pressure to keep a Serious Blog for the General Record, I pos...

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Beyond "hella"

2007-12-12T22:38:02Z

When the girls out here— and the guy I just held the door for— say "thank you," they in fact say "thenk yow", or "think yo," or something between, and then they shuffle off in their flip-flops. I can't reproduce this pronunciation at all; I've on...

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all the same

2007-12-12T05:10:47Z

I think I'd feel better with an acorn woodpecker around. These guys are loud! Loud, loud, loud, and they look like cartoon birds. They are all over campus. Like most woodpeckers, they are wholly adorable, and they cache acorns in acorn matric...

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it's good

2007-12-06T18:09:34Z

Things are basically great. I wouldn't complain unless I could face the sources of complaint without despair. It would be much harder to say anything negative about my life if I were still working at the bank— I'd just talk about how much money ...

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How not to work

2007-11-29T06:43:58Z

No, look, I have to shout my little shout, and then I'll bury my little snout back in my 50 books. I hate writing papers. Why? Because I have nothing paper-length to say about any appropriate topic. I find the form impossible. What I consider...

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in my own defense

2007-11-28T02:41:23Z

If I hadn't gone off on a mad search for a Book Unnecessary For My Research in the middle of my intensive paper-writing week, I would not have stumbled across the cart, hiding in the basement of the library, containing the Primary Source Totally T...

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"Medieval"

2007-11-27T07:15:25Z

It can be easy to forget, when reading the Inferno, just how tall an order it was to create a hell that exceeded the extremes of contemporary military and political violence on earth. The lovely Middle Ages of modern nostalgists aside (no names, ...

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my sympathies are obvious

2007-11-20T00:53:50Z

This cheered me up— from the Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2nd Edition, in "Dante and the lyric past" by Teodolinda Barolini (p. 27): The Rime contains the traces of Dante's stylistic and ideological experimentation. The tenzone of scurrilous so...

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On the plus side, the house is well anchored

2007-11-12T03:19:10Z

One of the problems with accumulating five billion books at a pace that far exceeds your ability to read or even skim them is that sometimes— on the days when the Internet is particularly dull— you become aware of them all. It's one thing to be a...

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NaPaWriMo

2007-11-08T19:21:10Z

No, I'm not going up to Napa to work on my novel. If only. Rather, this month must necessarily be devoted to writing papers, and I figure I might as well make a game of it. I wonder if there's a way to keep a page count going on Vox? There are...

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