Saturday, 24 September 2005

Joan Didion on Her Husband's Death

Joan Didion should not be allowed to recall the moment of and days after her husband's death.  I will have more to say about this.  For now I need a drink.

Sep 24, 2005 10:20:14 PM | Academia, Books, Literary Journalism, Literature

2 Comments

anonymous

Found this commentary on the Didion piece as well:

http://signpostsblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/just-couple-of-couples.html

Posted by: anonymous | Monday, 26 September 2005 at 03:17 AM

Jodi

I loved the Didion piece and found it completely moving.

Posted by: Jodi | Tuesday, 27 September 2005 at 01:05 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
Scholarly Swings and Misses From James Berger's essay ("Falling Towers and Postmodern Wild Children: Oliver Sacks, Don DeLillo and Turns Against Language") in the latest PMLA: Why did the wild child cross the highway? To show his imperviousness to every medium of symbolic exchange[!] He steps to the plate. Adjusts his crotch. Sets himself. Identifies the pitch. His hips cock, then rotate, as he pulls the bat through the hitting zone. He swings clear out of his shoes. He didn't mean to. But damn is it funny. Addendum: I would've written more on this article--and will in the near future--but I only read it because Holbo wanted to know if I could email it to him. So I figure it's only polite to let him have the first crack. But I have the second (on Berger's strange critique of Sacks' popular scientific writing) all lined up.
PREVIOUS POST
On Courseblogging & Constant Processing A response to the alway stimulating Professor Camicao: I thought I would talk a little more about the potential of my courseblog. First, here's how I sold the idea of a courseblog to my course director: It's the kind of thing that can function both as an "official" course blog--which the students are required to read during the quarter and respond (in the comment section) at least twice a week--and a clearinghouse for future LJ [Literary Journalism] instructors, since I'll be posting LJ-related links, teaching material, advice &c. on a daily basis. [ ... ] Obviously those columns need more work: more books, since I just grabbed all the LJ-oriented ones that I've purchased through Amazon the past two years from my Amazon history; more links to more writer's websites, and so on. But that'll evolve. One convenient thing about this is that it will 1) spread the workload thin for me this quarter (I don't have to compile massive lists, merely add to the ones I've already made as revisions occur to me) and 2) be a great resource (even further thinning the workload) for both myself and future LJ instructors. Another thing this format allows me to do is have the students respond almost immediately to exercises or discussions in class ... and have a permanent record of how they went over. Since I can organize them by categories (like "class discussion" or "activity evaluation"), future instructors can click on that category and read all the posts that concern specific activities and how well they went over &c. Of course, there's something more topical about a literary journalism course than, say, one I would teach on turn-of-the-century American literature ... but then again, perhaps there isn't, and perhaps what a good courseblog can do is make a course more topical, more immediate to the students' lives. Because one of the things I never can communicate to my students is how I see my research everywhere, how I tend to see everything I read in light of debates about evolutionary theory (even when those things have no direct bearing on evolutionary theory). To steal from the language of LJ: the students never acquire the sense of how immersed I am in my work, of how much of my mental space it occupies. Were I teaching a course on, say, "Science & Utopian Thought in the American Novel, 1880-1920" and had a courseblog, whenever I'm reading online newpapers or magazines or journals I could just hit the "blog this" button on my toolbar, insert a little note and post it to the courseblog. If I did that enough, the students would see what commitment to an intellectual project means: constant processing, not just something casually thought-about-the-night-before.

Scott Eric Kaufman

The Typepad Team

Search

Become a Fan

My Other Accounts

Recent Comments