Author Archives: jbj

Interview with Jean-Paul Pecqueur

This week’s post at Bookslut is a treat: An interview with Jean-Paul Pecqueur, whose book of poems, The Case Against Happiness, came out in November. What did happiness ever do to you? Why prosecute a case against it? It eluded … Continue reading

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Review: Glean, by Joshua Kryah

My review of Glean is in this month’s Bookslut: Prior to Joshua Kryah’s first book of poems, Glean, only one poet in the language had thought to include both “purblind” and “unbloom” in a single work. But Kryah’s opening poem, … Continue reading

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Review: Theory of Orange, by Rachel M. Simon

My review of Theory of Orange is in this month’s Bookslut: In characterizing Theory of Orange as comfort food, I’m not trying to be patronizing — rather, it strikes me that her basic method is to take a familiar conceit … Continue reading

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Students’ research and writing process

This month’s issue of Macworld imagines a typical student’s writing process, and it isn’t pretty: If you’re using Safari to do so some heavy-duty browsing, you’ve probably got multiple windows and multiple tabs open at once.  For instance, when doing … Continue reading

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For future students: How to ask to be let into a course

One of my best things is not taking things personally. Almost nothing has anything to do with me. –Robert Lopez, A Part of the World   Unlike Robert Lopez’s narrator,  “not taking things personally” is one of my worst things.  … Continue reading

Posted in higher education, teaching | 3 Comments

A summertime Friday query on faculty governance

If the student center changes their fries (to “steak-cut”), shouldn’t they have to run that by the faculty senate? Steak-cut’s gross. (It may well be, of course, that they’re just out of regular fries.  But isn’t it convenient that they’d … Continue reading

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Poetry links

My weekly post is up at Bookslut.  Topics include Darrell Grayson, “poetry therapy,” mathematical poems, an astronomer’s complaints about Whitman, and more. I think some interviews are likely to go up soon, and there’s something interesting coming in a few … Continue reading

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Facilities Management has a sense of humor

Yesterday, the following message went out to departments located in a campus building: Toilet partitions will be replaced in the second and third floor bathrooms of . . .  Hall.  The third floor restrooms will be closed tomorrow and the … Continue reading

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NAVSA spring 2007 newsletter

The North American Victorian Studies Association spring 2007 newsletter, which includes the big list of member books, is now up.

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Women and The Wire

Urmee Khan has a terminally silly post this morning at the Guardian‘s Comment Is Free site, arguing that only middle-aged white guys like HBO’s brilliant show, The Wire.  Her chief objection to the show is its treatment of women: It … Continue reading

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