I’m going to glide over Cheryl’s comment that somebody once told her that The Da Vinci Code was a great way to learn history, because if  I think about it too much I’m going to cry. But Robert says that I want three very different things that are not necessarily even compatible with each other,…

Okay, that’s a really old song that a lot of people I knew in college used to sing, usually right before expressing confusion as to whether or not it was a joke.  I still don’t know. But Lee suggested reading Susan Jacoby’s book The Age of  Unreason, which  I have, and that line from that song…

It’s Monday again, and that means  I’m not going to have access to a computer after the next hour or so, so I’ve decided to start this early. I’ve been looking at the comments, and a couple of things occur to me. First is that it’s absolutely true.  Even twenty years ago, the students I…

Oh, ack. In the first place, I didn’t say that a genre was a book with a “pat” ending, and although the endings of genre novels are predictble in the sense that they are predermined–the heroin will marry the hero who will turn out not to be the brutal thug he’s appeared throughout the entire…

I think we need to do a little defining of terms here. Robert says he thinks a lot of people think “mainstream” fiction is a genre, but I’m willing to bed he doesn’t mean mainstream, but contemporary literary fiction.  There is certainly a strain of American contemporary literary fiction–the stuff stemming from the Updike/Salinger tradition,…

I really wish I could say I’d invented the phrase I used for a title this morning, but it’s actually been around a long time, usually as a way to describe the nineteenth century novel in both  Frrance and England.  I was thinking about it, though, because of what somebody said about characters with goals. …

So, first, an update–at eleven o’clock yesterday morning, common sense somehow reached the vital core of the administrative brain, and all classes were cancelled for the rest of the day.  I wouldn’t put it past the state police to have raised a fuss–the idea of students and teachers slipping and sliding in what was by…

I am writing this sitting in my office at home, and outside the snow is coming down steadily as it has been for hours.  Everything in the northern two thirds of this state is closed, except, of course, for the place where I teach.  That has declared itself open as f some time later this…

Here’s a question, related to nothing at all we’ve been talking about so far:  where did all the money go, and what happened to mass entertainment to make so much of it cost as much as a mortgage? I’m not talking about the financial meltdown now.  If we’d been experience a financial meltdown for the…

Okay, this isgoing to be short.  I was supposed to be writing this at eleven o’clock in the morning in a nice computer lab on the same floor where I teach, but I’m beginning to wonder if incompetent nutsiness is some kind of virus that’s catching. Back up a little and look at last week,…