It’s impossible to follow up a post on the death of a loved one and sound anything but banal, but here goes: Friday, I got a call at the office from my old friend Matt Ruben, an urban studies scholar in drag as a literature scholar (or is it the other way around?) Anyway, I …
Category Archives: Text
Tetrys: June 1992-May 1 2007
This morning, I found Tet lying on his side, by the door to the patio, like he’d laid down to rest. He passed away during the night — he was still a little warm when I found him. After a year and a half’s battle with cancer, partial renal failure, and a variety of other …
Some Cran Bread to Tide You Over
My mind is just brimming with ideas for this blog, especially as we roll into our 3rd summer (2nd full) in Montreal. Reflections on my big course this term and the project of mass education that universities have undertaken; reflections on our “settling” here and changing knowledge of the city; a few technological matters in …
A Brief Gee-Whiz Post
As I may have mentioned before, my mp3 project has a bit of an oral history dimension to it, since may of the people involved in developing the technology are still alive and happy to talk about their part in it. I’ve done a couple of these interviews by telephone now, as I’ve been travelling …
A Few Thoughts on the Virginia Tech Massacre
Despite my taste for violence in fiction, I have a very limited appetite for mediatic violence when it corresponds to something that actually happened. Which is to say that I’m not particularly a news junkie when it comes to disaster and monstrosity and thus have not been following the Virginia Tech Massacre beyond reading enough …
Continue reading “A Few Thoughts on the Virginia Tech Massacre”
A Dispatch From South of the Border
The following email arrived in my inbox yesterday, which I am reproducing here. If you want to skip to the chase, here’s a link to a letter you can send to the Postal Board of Governors. I’m not sure if they’ll pay attention if you’ve got a Canadian address, but then, it being the U.S., …
Here Come the Leaping Lesbians
For each academic year since I’ve become a professor, the end of classes has been punctuated by a rock show. I have fond memories of sitting on the Carnegie-Mellon lawn in Pittsburgh, lazily watching a lukewarm set by Superchunk. Another year we drove to Cleveland to watch Shiner (one of my favorite bands at the …