Last night, I was finally able to view Apple’s recent education event from New York City. Yes, I had read about their announcements and downloaded iBooks Author and the new iTunes U, but hadn’t realized just how potentially game-changing these new tools are for what I do.
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Updates
A large chunk of my holiday was spent in geek mode. Yes, I partook of holiday spirits, exercised a bit, and relaxed — but I needed to do some pretty significant updates to some outdated servers that I’m responsible for on campus. This is a record of what I did to breathe new life into my obsolete equipment.
The Subversive Education
Real education is subversive. It’s about nuance and irony — the challenging of the status quo. This is what I do.
Forced Separation
It started yesterday: boxes that had begun appearing in the hallway were being moved out. The Humanities Department is finally no more. We are now the English Department and the Department of Media, Culture & the Arts. The former is moving upstairs. It’s sad.
Occupied?
Want to fix our current economic crisis? Start with higher education. I look at a root cause of America’s current class anxieties.
Mailer as Novelist
Norman Mailer saw the responsibility of the novelist is a double-edged sword: he must posit an authoritative vision of structure in form and content, yet always be aware that “no authorities exist that have certain knowledge.” This places the novelist in an ethical and existential position of great responsibility.
The Web v. the Book
When I spoke at the Norman Mailer Society Conference in 2005, I was asked to discuss the position of literature and English Studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century, how the work of Norman Mailer fit into these cultural and intellectual trends, and recommend ways that the Society might continue to flourish in a still incunabular information age.