Social Class Reproduction

Four Rules for Teaching Writing:
Image result for image: joy of writing
Always give writing assignments that

1. you will enjoy reading;
2. students will enjoy writing;
3. students will enjoy reading what others in the class have written
4. you will enjoy writing.

If any one of these conditions were not true, then it probably wasn't a very good assignment.

Advice I give to my students: When your words surprise you, you know you are writing.

Thursday, March 30, 2017

My Dog Who Dies

I might start looking for a new dog now. Miles was such a lovely dog; can’t think of it now. Hard to handle the death of another. 

It's easier to handle my own. 

It's hard to handle perspective: the universe within which I and my dogs don’t matter; the world, within which idiots like Trump matter; my world, within which my dog who dies matters. 

Friday, March 17, 2017

On Reading Foucault Too Early in the Morning

Image result for image: black holeI woke up this morning around three. Played my guitar (new song) for a while; then picked up my bedside copy of Foucault's Archeology of Knowledge. This is about the third time I've tried to read it. I finally have got his rhythm and actually like his writing—and his thinking, the origin of deconstruction: the absence beneath words, really, the indeterminacy of words—I wrote undeconstructively about this in one of my early articles, "The Yin and Yang of Genres" (cute title, huh?).

Went back to sleep thinking about the indeterminacy of life.

Two of his great lines: the occulation of discourse (I worked on that for about a half hour.)

"I am trying to define the blank space from which I speak." (I got that right away.)