Greetings from sunny San Diego! We lucked into a room with a view of the bay. We’ve had some delicious seafood, have met with several friends old and new, and even attended a panel or two. Wish you were here.
food, company, sunshine
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Author Archives: ghw
what makes a blogger herd words?
What do Wordherders write about? Check out…
- Jason J on Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White.
- Jason R on gaming and biofeedback rings.
- Tanya on attending church.
- Chuck on the film Blue Car.
- Matt on the “Grammatology of the Hard Drive”.
- Natalie on her trip to Tanzania.
- Kari on bibliophagi.
- Dave on Gregory Peck.
- Calamity Jane on “portraiture, self-portraiture, and women’s ekphrastic poetry in the 20th century”.
- Ryan on designing a composition course entitled “The Pleasure and Politics of Eating”.
- eriC on Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and a related ABC News special.
- Mike on his Kitchen Aid Artisan 5-quart stand mixer.
But “Winston” thinks we’re all incestuous Marxists, apparently because I use the word “collective” to describe the Wordherders and because we comment on each other’s blogs. I would respectfully suggest that inattention to detail and nuance is more likely to sink one’s chances on the job market than academic prejudice against conservatives.
By the way, I use the word “collective” in the sense of “a collective body or whole” as in this example from 1655: “A Jewell (sometimes taken for a single precious stone) is properly a collective of many” (taken from online OED).
don’t be a stranger
If you’re going to San Diego and you want to do the blogger meetup thing, email me (ghw at wordherders dot net) to get my cell phone number. I’ll be staying at the Marriott.
broadway here we come
One of our projects while we’re in San Diego, where we’ll visit with MLA-attending friends who are now spread far and wide, is to write a rock opera. This is the sort of thing that kept us sane in grad school, where we came up with a few parody songs about literary theory and three songs of a rock opera about a serial killer.
Already some collaboration has started over email. It looks promising. I’ll keep you posted, if you like.
cambodian pop
At SRO Video the other night, L picked out City of Ghosts, Matt Dillon’s directing debut. The movie’s not bad, but I was really taken with the soundtrack, which featured what I assume to be traditional Cambodian music along with Khmer versions of American pop songs and Khmer pop songs from before Pol Pot’s murderous reign. By browsing Amazon, I also came across additional recordings in a similar vein: the debut release by Dengue Fever and a compilation of various artists entitled Cambodian Rocks. You can listen to short snippets from the first two CDs at Amazon. Captivating stuff.