Text of Proposed Petition for “A Million Knockers for Peace” Sept. 20 Campaign (received from Code Pink via e-mail) followed by my response PETITION Members of the United States Congress: The five and a half years of war in Iraq has been an exercise of … [Read more...]

Surely it cannot be the case that New York City is experiencing a latter-day “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers”? Surely it would be indefensibly superstitious to attribute our real estate wars and gentrification woes to some extra-terrestrial surge or supernatural … [Read more...]

…a cloth flower pinned to her dress where cool chicks wear their Obama buttons.—Manohla Dargis, film review of "Sex and the City," New York Times 5/30/08 I admit I often feel like a vegan on Turkey Day, a C.O. in World War II, or a loud lesbian guest at … [Read more...]

Memorial Day Weekend: not, for me, the official start of summer but rather the start of “my time.” They don’t own me and now it’s official. Classes have ended, the grades have gone in, I’ve sat through graduation, smiled at the parents and aunts and sisters and … [Read more...]

Do you know about Poetry Daily’s poem-a-day service during April? It’s a great idea, a concierge service for the poetry-minded, delivering one oldie-but-goodie per day to your in-box together with a comment from the rotating poet-"curator." On April 17, the poem … [Read more...]

Like others involved in the labor of social reproduction, educators are under particular pressure to embody and transmit the values of power—which seeks through their labor to reproduce itself and the circumstances most favorable to it. The degree to which … [Read more...]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about depictions of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve been surfing the Internet, reading blog posts about various forms of military activity. I’ve been reading coverage by print journalists, including Trish Wood’s What Was … [Read more...]

I finished The Iliad. As if it is two books, two tales: the one that is enthralled with Violence Variations, and the other that depicts life, emotion (other than battle-glee), domesticity beleaguered--whether next the "beaked ships" or within the walled … [Read more...]

What an epic of attrition is the Iliad! And what a matchless paeon to war's eroticism--between the way in which the dressing of the hero's beautiful sacrificial body is described, and the way in which the text "loves" that body's destruction, with its butcher's … [Read more...]

The writing program in which I teach has decided to adopt a "foundational" literature curriculum, sort of a Great Books Lite, served up with multicultural condiments--a smattering of Koran, tidbits of Japanese poetry. Most of the stuff is by deceased Caucasian … [Read more...]