Some of you are on Facebook, and those of you who are know that I posted this link http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/tip-sheet/article/53409-the-top-10-most-difficult-books.html about a week ago.  The link is to a story in  Publisher’s Weekly about a list of the “10 Most Difficult Books.” What is meant, of course, is that these are the ten most difficult to…

Well, for the sake of a few explanations: 1) “unrealistic expectations” are not the same thing as false hope.  Unrealistic expectations are when you’re talented at writing and want to make you’re living as a writer, and you’re just convinced you’re to do it. The odds are, of course, that you won’t. But false hope…

So, I’ve been thinking about this thing of my needing fiction to present me with a possible, actual existing world, and not one that is entirely of the imagination. And it occurs to me that this is what I demand of almost everything, and not just of fiction. One of the things I used to…

Lymaree asks why the moon couldn’t be just as good a destination as Paris, and all I can say is this– For me,  it can’t. I’m NOT putting down science fiction. I’m just saying that, FOR ME, trips to the moon, interstellar travel and all the rest of it bore me silly.  I accept the…

Most of the time, when I get angry or upset with things that happen on this blog, I just go away for a while until I calm down, and then start in on another topic. This time, I’m disinclined to do that. Yesterday, I wrote about a book that I truly love, and that was…

One of the things I do when I’m writing–and yes, I’m writing something, that’s why I haven’t been around as much as usual–is to try to restrict myself to reading what helps me write and not what hurts. I have, for reasons I don’t understand, very definite writing responses to many books. Not all, mind…

So, the first set of papers came in for my Lit and Comp course, and I have been walking around them ever since, nearly astounded. You’ve got to note this:  this is not a remedial class. And my students are NOT adolescents. They’re adults with jobs and families coming back to get a degree. Lit…

So, over the last few days, I’ve been working a lot, and I haven’t been paying much attention to the news.  For one thing, we’re in the run-up to a Presidential election, and that means that most of the news is of the “shock! horror! the grass is green!” genre of journalism.  This is when…

So, the other day, while I was talking about expressing ourselves, I mentioned that the textbook I am required to use for my Literature and Composition course is, as all such textbooks are, composed largely of the obvious and the second rate. Since then, I’ve gotten a flurry of e-mails from a number of people…

Last week I started teaching a course that will run from 6 to 9 on Tuesday nights for eight weeks, part of an accelerated degree program for adults.  Teaching adults has a lot going for it, not the least of which is that they’re serious about what they do, and this term what I’m teaching…