I could only respond in a gasp of surprise upon seeing the news of John Updike’s death. He was, without question, one of America’s great “men of letters,” if you’ll forgive the cliche. I appreciated his fiction and stories (I notice one of my earliest blog posts was on Updike’s Early Stories), some his poetry,…
Much could be said about today’s events, but not by me. Let me just highlight Elizabeth Alexander‘s poem for the inauguration, with a lilt and rhythm that, it seems to me, calls to mind a marriage between the Beat poets and hip-hop. Praise song for the day. Each day we go about our business, walking…
As per usual, Stanley Fish’s latest column on higher education is provocative, and not a little disheartening. Riffing on Frank Donoghue’s book, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, Fish documents the decline and irreversible trajectory of higher education which has hitched its wagon to pragmatist “training” and job certification…
The new Eerdmans catalogue includes information on a new little book of mine that will appear in April. The Devil Reads Derrida: and Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts, gathers together a number of my “popular” pieces that have appeared in magazines and other periodicals ranging from the Christian Century…
I’m about halfway through Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which has been a breezy but fascinating read (any book whose argument hinges on Canadian hockey players is bound to suck in a Canuck). I’ll comment more fully on the book when I’m done (over at What I’m Reading), but given David Brooks’ column on Gladwell today, I…
Apropos the last post, consider Adam Gopnik’s recent summary of Samuel Johnson’s “philosophy” of criticism: No critic has ever been wiser about the limits of criticism, and about how few rules can ever be made for writing; Johnson is the model of a reactive critic, seeing when a piece of writing was made, and how…