James Merrill and the poetics of memory

never had to produce this to see a doctor (after living in NC, TN, CA, MO).

Starship Troopers (dir. Verhoven) is an interesting text with its deep satire often misread.

I remember when they first appeared in my mid-sized Midwestern town and I saw people turning left into them!

Graeber was describing a mechanism of capitalism that continued to find ways to keep people working on a pointless treadmill so as to forestall the realization the capitalism sucked. It has indeed continued to keep "going strong," but now AI threatens to upend this.

Did the manosphere AI tech lords not realize that the jobs they were cutting were male-dominated? It'll be interesting to see what happens when most of the jobs left are versions of "care" work, traditionally delegated to women.

Also, the realization that most of the jobs that corporate "bullsh*t" jobs (a la David Graeber) that men have dominated are being cut for AI and the "care" jobs that have traditionally been associated with women are not so easily replaced. Like in COVID, essential workers does not equal hige wages.

We are at the "The Death of Stalin" phase of MAGA.

I love the Marcella, but I wouldn't marinate it because it's notably fragile.

As currently defined, an university president is all about appeasing curators/boards/regents (mainly lawyers and corporate execs) and the state (whether state or federal level). Under this logic, it makes sense to hire a lawyer. That this is a travesty is just a reflection of the status quo, alas.

My online students seem to have lots of recommendations for this! I'll poll all the students who received partial credit for their inaccurate summaries of critical readings of "Bartleby the Scrivener"!

or Jews. My pseudo-WASP wife is unable to understand how hard-wired the notion that the greatest imaginable calamity would be inviting people over and not having enough food in Jewish culture.

It's not just in academia and media: it's basically the destruction of the professional middle class, and it's been an ongoing project for a while now. Capital no longer needs an educated class to justify its existence: www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rl...

I know that it is ridiculous, but I love this movie! I am absolutely convinced that one of my grad school mentors (a Norwegian lit theorist) was the source for Julianne Moore's character. Taking it seriously is like getting upset that Cary Grant isn't really a paleontologist in "Bringing Up Baby."

When he admits that the only way he can justify his move to Florida, amidst its attack on free speech and intellectual freedom is by "exercising rational ignorance," this tells us everything we need to know about his profound commitment to civic values and virtue.

Dirty Money and Bad Science at MIT's Media Lab The school's investigation shows that two separate scandals—over Jeffrey Epstein and OpenAg—were closely linked.

www.wired.com/story/dirty-...

Report: Duke Professor Appears Prominently In Newly Released Epstein Emails The Duke Chronicle reports that Ariely’s name appears hundreds of times in a massive federal document dump tied to the Epstein investigation.

yep: poetsandquants.com/2026/01/31/r...

I just noticed that you are at Colorado College: my daughter was admitted and planning to start there next fall. She is very excited (but not planning to be an English major, having 2 English professor parents!).

the worst is finishing a good book at bedtime; I have to start another book immediately.

I can see Schumer cursing this, because now he'll need to take a stronger position rather than risking sounding too much like Trump.

It's a little surprising (and saddening) to see that it's not more unpopular.

what happened to the 'hidden hand of the market'? If users don't adopt it, it is because it's not helpful, not needed.

As Leslie Fiedler told us in 1960, the main American literary tradition is gothic (I'm teaching a grad seminar on American Gothic, so I just re-read Fiedler).

and then he just only wrote poetry...

I submitted an article for consideratino and it felt oddly heroic.

there are no jobs for young people. Our enrollments went up during the 2008 crash (English majors shot up: students told me "I'm not going to get a job anyway, why not study what I want to?").

Before Nicolás Maduro, There Was Manuel Noriega

Presumably they will use the precedent of Noriega in Panama, argued by Bill Barr in 1989: www.pbs.org/newshour/nat...

my first pair of progressives were simply because it was too much of a pain to teach with readers (glasses on, look at text; glasses off, look at students). Sadly, this is no longer the only reason.

I tried to persuade my family to watch this last night (as a Christmas movie)! They rebuffed me. I will try again.

I will say that there has definitely been a shift from the period when I started grad school and the NYT covered Stanley Fish's Duke English dept as the cover article on their magazine (my NYT-worshipping mother nearly expired from pride that I was starting the Ph.D. program that fall).