A few weeks ago, Lime and I had argued about something — one of those dumb, petty, transient arguments that all couples have — and I went for a walk to cool off. As I walked along the street, I saw something awful happen. There was a thin black cat on the sidewalk, coming towards me, and it was so skinny that it reminded me of that poem of Basho’s about the girl cat, so thin on love and barley. Except that this cat wasn’t beloved, wasn’t fed on barley. It was so thin on rats and garbage, poor thing. …
Month: April 2008
The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler… and What We’re Missing Today
This book came up at a party I was at, and when she heard that I had it on the bookshelf, but hadn’t read it yet, told me I could probably get through it in a couple of hours. I scoffed, because I’m a slow reader, but she was right, that was all it took. Properly speaking, I never bought this book. Lime snagged a box of books on some online Korean doctors’ message board, and bought the box for the Robin Cook paperbacks, but a few other things were included, such as autobiographies by the Clintons, a copy of …
Tech We Need
Boing-Boing reports: Biologist Rupert Sheldrake stabbed at lecture. And to think I imagined, immediately, that it was some IDiot. But it was, apparently, a deranged visitor from Japan. I seriously wonder whether it’s going to become easier, or harder, to pinpoint whether another person is a nutball or not as we get more deeply embedded into the Net in our daily lives — I mean, as the interfaces get more and more distributed to everywhere instead of just on little screens in front of us. The scary thing is that to use the advantage, we’d have to be giving up …
Migration
My site will be moving in the night. It’ll still be here, same address, but it’s shifting from one server to another. This means some downtime. Not to worry. It’ll all be back to normal soon!
Student Culture & Student Expectations
I recently posted about student expectations with regard to course difficulty. Students — the same ones — have been mentioning, again, how difficult my two content courses are. This is not surprising, really, since in one we’ve been discussing the contribution of African-American popular culture to mainstream American (and really, global) popular culture — in terms not just of tangible contributions like to the musical language, to language itself, to style, to abstract ideas like “cool,” but also how African-American culture (or certain understandings [and misunderstandings] of aspects of it) got taken up consciously by, say, the beats, as an …