“Forget about washing your face” he said, “And come to bed.”

He was holding my face in his hands. I was thinking, now we were alone, “Eight hours on the plane, and I must look like hell; he hasn’t seen me in four months; my mouth is a lint filled dryer and if I throw my arms around his neck he’ll smell thirty weeks of tears, he’ll smell my fear, my craving for him, and that one-way ticket bringing me like a homesick angel to Heathrow today? It will be a joke.”

His voice was husky when he said again “Come to bed” but this time he rubbed his cheek against my neck when he said it. I felt the heat of his breath, smelled his worry, tasted his moist, afraid mouth, and so stinking and grinning and sweating we fell, wrapped together like ribbons untied into Boxing Day.

(Photo by Flickr user Mike Babcock)

I often see people agonizing over what to buy friends and family for Christmas and birthdays, even though they always have a ready answer.

Buy books. Buy them again and again. Make it a yearly tradition to add to people’s library, and maintain a theme. My wife’s father is a Churchill fan, and so our shopping for him is a breeze. My nieces are heading into high school, and by the time they go to college they will have a complete collection of Shakespeare (in the paperback series by Yale).

For the kids, it’s a necessity. On the last Noel-Levitz Freshman Attitudes report (go

—A is for aunts, swarms of, all of whom are explaining how you could have cooked the food just a little, little bit differently for a lot more flavor, but really, what you made is just fine, not to worry. —B is for brothers, the ones watching televised blood sports throughout the family holiday. —C is for caterers, which you wish you had. —D is for Dumb and Dumber, which, along with Something About Mary, are the videos brought by younger members of the family and all they want to watch on the televisions not occupied by the blood-sports events being observed by the male members of the family unit. —E is for everything , as in “I can’t believe Iundefinedate.” —F is for obscenities, which you must not say in front of the children, even when you spill the stuffing on the floor because the cheap aluminum pan you used collapses under its own weight, never mind that the youngsters are...

Photo of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, from www.you-are-here.com

As with almost everything else, the news in contemporary art hasn’t been good lately. The biggest bad story concerns the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA). Housed in an elegant Arata Isozaki building (it opened in 1986) and considered one of the best of its kind in the world, it’s teetering on the brink of financial collapse. Jeremy Strick, a respected curator who came from the Art Institute of Chicago to be the director of MOCA in 1999, is negotiating some way to leave his post with dignity — and maybe a little change in his pocket.

During Strick’s tenure, MOCA mounted a string of big, important exhibitions, but it also hemorrhaged money. Dipping into its endowment to pay operating expenses — a no-no in practically any organization — MOCA saw the principle shrivel from $50-million a ...

What kind of college admissions office sends out rejection letters the week before the holiday break? I recently found out about one high-school student devastated by just such bad news — and only a few days before she was all set to celebrate Christmas. Something about the timing of that decision just seems heartless to me. I mean, how difficult would it be to have all your letters ready but to send them out in early January, after students have gotten a chance to enjoy the holidays? Is there really any strategic value for the students in getting the bad news now vs. next year? I can’t think of a particularly good one.

Now acceptance letters are a different story. Those could certainly go out before the holiday break — to be duly incorporated into the celebratory festivities. But even if the admissions office also has their rejection envelops all licked, stamped, and ready to go, ...

This week’s Chronicle Review has three strong essays on literature and higher education, and each one is a mix of lament and devotion. Rita Felski, Steven Kellman, and Bruce Fleming signal a decline and offer an explanation, and their complaints overlap at several points.

For Felski, literary studies in the academy have grown so arcane and sophisticated that they have lost contact with the fundamental motivations people have for reading literature in the first place. Kellman observes that other distractions and diversions — “Web sites, movies, TV shows, CD’s, and video games” — have crowded books out of leisure life. “The disappearance of books is as catastrophic as the extinction of French or Japanese,” he says, “it would mean the loss of a mode of thinking and being.” And for Fleming, literary studies has turned into a coterie activity, with experts “killing” the love of...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Part 1: Overview & Key Facts Part 2: Kudos for Recommendations Part 3: Complaints and concerns Part 4: Interview with Paul Lauter

There are some problems with MLA’s representation of the needs and circumstances of the nontenurable faculty. If you want to know how they really live and think, watch Linda Janakos’s documentary, Teachers on Wheels. Really, watch it: she’s a much better filmmaker than I’ll ever be.

All reports of this kind are a compromise, and not all compromises are successful. The authors of this report are frank about being divided on the issue of nontenurable faculty between the meliorative, pragmatic, and sometimes apologist position long represented by committee chair David Bartholomae and the view, long represented by committee member Paul Lauter, that a permanently nontenurable faculty is “an illegitimate...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Part 1: Overview & Key Facts Part 2: Kudos for Recommendations Part 3: Complaints and concerns Part 4: Interview with Paul Lauter

Along with graduate student activists, and members of the Radical Caucus like Paul Lauter, Cary Nelson has for two decades urged the MLA to commit more resources to the needs and issues of faculty serving contingently. If you’re going to be at the convention, stop by the SUNY booth to meet him and get him to inscribe a copy of the splendid festschrift devoted to his exemplary, selfless career, Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University. Monday, December 29, 2008, 11am – 12pm

In part 1 of this series, I said that the MLA report on the workforce in English is a mixed bag — important new commitments to higher standards of data gathering and analysis and some good recommendations, but also some...

(RNA molecule image at Wikimedia Commons)

Is the future of science publishing unfolding in the free-for-all of Wikipedia?

Yesterday Nature reported that RNA Biology, which publishes research on families of RNA molecules, announced it will begin requiring that geneticists who submit their work to the journal agree to write a Wikipedia entry summarizing their findings. They’ve done so with the noble goal of using “the opportunities of mixed science publishing to bring reliable research resources to wider scientific and lay audiences,” as editor-in-chief Renee Schroeder wrote in the press release accompanying the announcement. It’s a curious twist that embraces in part the Googlish mantra that more data is better data, but puts the breaks on the more troubling fact that anyone who accesses Wikipedia faces: the authority of the information found on its pages. Those Wikipedia entries ...

All we’re talking about in Connecticut is the failure of the economy, how we have to cut our budgets, how I can no longer count on two graduate assistants to work on the journal I’ve edited for nearly twenty years (LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory). My co-editor, Margaret E. Mitchell at University of West Georgia, and I are scrambling to keep the publication alive despite these drastic withdrawals of support, and what does Connecticut’s governor do?

She sends all non-essential state personnel home today at 11 a.m. because it’s going to snow.

As if snow is a BIG DEAL.

It started to snow about an hour ago. Let me emphasize this point: It’s only snowing. It’s not doing anything worse. Or anything weird. We live in New England. Snow is what happens in this part of the country in the winter. There are — as of right now, anyway — no flaming swords shrieking from the sky, no...