Author Archives: jbj

There’s no easy way to say this: A & I went see Neil Diamond’s concert Thursday night. (Here’s the Courant’s review; the WFSB news producer liked the show.) It’s safe to say we differ on the Diamond: A has strong … Continue reading →

This is Kate Summerscale, describing textile factories in Trowbridge in 1860: in the morning the machines would start to pound and whirr, and the air would thicken with smoke, soot, the smells of urine (collected in tubs from public houses … Continue reading →

After a brief hiatus to get caught up in my project of re-reading Freud volume by volume, the PsychoSlut column is back in the August issue of Bookslut, reading The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: My five-year-old memorizes song lyrics like … Continue reading →

Bad: Nader Saleh, landlord of the Robert E. Sheridan apartment building at 75 Martin Luther King Drive, said Tuesday that he has been battling a bedbug problem in about a dozen rooms in his building for six weeks. It’s one … Continue reading →

This fall semester will mark, if my math is correct, ten years that I’ve been teaching courses of my own design.  (For one previous year, I taught composition courses from a department-chosen text, hewing closely to model department syllabi, culminating … Continue reading →

So, the boy has been reading the all-ages Marvel comic, X-Men: First Class: New Beginnings, which collects issues 1-4 of X-Men: First-Class. In issue 4, “Seeing Red,” the X-Men and Dr. Strange travel to another dimension in order to return … Continue reading →

Motoko Rich’s NY Times essay about the old books-vs-web chestnut, “Online, R U Really Reading?,” has generated a fair amount of attention.  While I don’t usually agree with Laurie Fendrich about a lot, her conclusion is correct: A new elite … Continue reading →

The boy found this picture–it’s my ID card for the British Library in the summer of 1999–a few weeks ago, and for a minute or two couldn’t figure out who it was:   For reference, here’s a pretty recent picture: … Continue reading →

You can see me talk–*very* glibly, and mostly to undergrads–about Lost Causes: Historical Consciousness in Victorian Literature on our campus’s “Central Authors” television show here.  (Scroll down to November.)

I hadn’t really noticed this formally until yesterday, but apparently once you follow someone in Twitter, all their previous updates are retroactively incorporated into your timeline, as if you had been following that person forever. That’s a slightly puzzling behavior: … Continue reading →