We’re heading home today, and I’ll post more when I get there. For now, dear reader, you might like to read this article, by Scott Jaschik of the new Inside Higher Ed, on last night’s blogger meetup.
Author Archives: ghw
mla bloggers: today @ 4:00, entrance to book exhibit
Four or five of us plan to meet at 4:00 today (December 29) at the entrance to the book exhibit here at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Be there or be square.
By the way, weird comment spam problems continue here on Wordherders. I have temporarily changed the settings on this blog’s comments so that you need to sign in to TypeKey in order to leave a comment. I anticipate being able to change back to open but moderated comments in the very near future.
annual article on the mla convention
Courtesy of the New York Times:
Every year more than 10,000 literature scholars gather at the end of December for the convention of the Modern Language Association, the 120th of which begins today in Philadelphia.
Past conventions have yielded papers with titles that were rife with bad puns, cute pop-culture references and an adolescent preoccupation with sex, from “Victorian Buggery” to “Bambi on Top” and the tragically hip “Judith Butler Got Me Tenure (but I Owe My Job to K. D. Lang): High Theory, Pop Culture, and Some Thoughts About the Role of Literature in Contemporary Queer Studies.”
The convention has become a holiday ritual for journalists, as routine as articles on the banning of Christmas crËches in public places, and every year a goodly number of those scholars tempt journalists to write articles, like this one, noting some of the wackier-sounding papers presented.
…What any of it has to do with teaching literature to America’s college students remains as vexing a question to some today as it was a decade ago. There is, in fact, something achingly 90’s about the whole affair. The association has come to resemble a hyperactive child who, having interrupted the grownups’ conversation by dancing on the coffee table, can’t be made to stop.
As I’ve written before, articles like this are fundamentally dishonest.
[Update: comments taking place at Crooked Timber]
beyond what words can express
Unbelievable tragedy on the other side of the world as an earthquake creates tidal waves that kill over 19,000 people. Here are links to the American Red Cross and the British Red Cross.
[Via Crooked Timber]
widespread abuse in american detention centers
From Bill Tozier
Washington Post editorial
“War Crimes”
Thursday, December 23, 2004; Page A22
THANKS TO a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and other human rights groups, thousands of pages of government documents released this month have confirmed some of the painful truths about the abuse of foreign detainees by the U.S. military and the CIA — truths the Bush administration implacably has refused to acknowledge. Since the publication of photographs of abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in the spring the administration’s whitewashers — led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — have contended that the crimes were carried out by a few low-ranking reservists, that they were limited to the night shift during a few chaotic months at Abu Ghraib in 2003, that they were unrelated to the interrogation of prisoners and that no torture occurred at the Guantanamo Bay prison where hundreds of terrorism suspects are held. The new documents establish beyond any doubt that every part of this cover story is false.