I just discovered that I’m not at all bad at analyzing poetry. If the enjoyment of the activity is any sort of an indicator (and with me it usually is), then I might actually be quite good.

I always thought I’d suck at poetry, so I never tried it. But a book titled Literature of the Crisis would look freaky if it pointedly excluded poetry just because I’m scared of it.

So I started analyzing a poem, and it turns out I have a lot to say about it. And I recognize the poems this poet makes use of because it turns out I have read quite a lot of poetry and am not as unprepared as I thought I was to analyze it. 

I blame my teachers for this terror of poetry that I used to feel. They made me believe that analyzing poetry was too hard and too useless and not to be attempted. It turns out, however, that if you really love a poem (and have had training in literary analysis), you will be able to say quite a lot about it. 

This whole awakening to poetry is a result of my interactions with one of my students. He’s been analyzing poetry in every essay he ever handed in to me and was doing a kick-ass job. And as I was discussing his work with him, I kind of got into the whole thing and decided to continue it on my own. I’m just happy that I didn’t turn out to be one of those professors who imbue students with the fear of poetry. I mean, I almost did but this student resisted me. And I’m very happy he did.

OK, I’ll stop gushing now and go analyze me some more poetry.

In 1902, the great historian Theodor Mommsen was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. At that time, everybody knew that the writing of history is just as creative and fictional as the production of novels or poetry.

OK, why is my Walter Scott post trending all of a sudden?  It has all of six words or so in it. Has there been a new development in the story?

Among all of the garbage written about Caitlyn Jenner, there is a piece that is not worthless. Strangely, it has been published in the NYTimes. Fell free to read the article in question here but I just want to comment on the closing paragraph:

Bruce Jenner told Ms. Sawyer that what he looked forward to most in his transition was the chance to wear nail polish, not for a furtive, fugitive instant, but until it chips off. I want that for Bruce, now Caitlyn, too. But I also want her to remember: Nail polish does not a woman make.

That’s precisely the thing: there is no there there. There is no uniform experience that all women share and that all men don’t. Searching for such an experience leads people in the crazy direction of equating womanhood with nail polish. 

In reality, there is no gender experience that cannot be turned around completely by age, social class, financial status, culture, religion, profession, intellect, and a million other factors. Jenner’s vision of womanhood is that of a very rich, pampered, and frankly stupid person. And that’s precisely the perfect test of how far one is ready to go in defending the right to self-determination. It’s easy to defend the rights of the smart, profound, interesting, or truly victimized. But the rich, brain-dead airheads are human, too, and as onerous as it is to stand up for them, we should remember that the hard work of respecting the basic humanity of others has to be done even when the others do everything to avoid evoking respect.

So we have migrated to outlook.office365.com and it’s an absolute freeping disaster. The interface is absolutely ridiculous. Everything bleeds into everything else in the streams of white color. I chose the most clearly defined interface, and this is what it looks like:

If I want to delete an email, it’s a whole process because there is no visible box next to the email to click. And the Delete button is located in a faraway and counterintuitive place. All of my folders have been destroyed, of course. And I have a filing system that is very much based on folders. 

Plus, the website takes forever to open. There is literally no upside to this switch. We keep futzing with our university email every couple of years, and every change has been massively worse than whatever preceded it.

Putin has been freaked out by the unanimous rejection of his actions by the G7 and is now trying to suck up to Italy in hopes of splintering it away from the countries that condemn Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Being kicked out of the G8 has been an enormous blow to Putin. The little weasel hoped to rule the group by now, and the invasion of Ukraine was going to help him do that. Obviously, that’s not how things work but it’s not like he’s known for great insight or a sophisticated understanding of international politics.

Apparently, another round of “history wars” is underway as historians battle politicians over the right to define how history will be taught in US high schools.

All I can say is that there is something deeply wrong with the way history is taught to high-schoolers. My students this year were extremely vague on the Vietnam War. And I mean vague to the point of not knowing who fought whom and for what reason. The US involvement was barely on their radar.

I don’t think I need to tell anybody on this blog why it’s absolutely crucial to know about Vietnam. But I have no space in my syllabus for it. I already have enough with needing to break the news that Hitler ‘ s been dead since 1945.

History is the most ideological of disciplines but if someone at least tried to get the students learn some basic facts, that’d help.

Why the LSU will not go bankrupt  (for now):

“So who is going to pay the price for saving LSU?” I said.

“The poor,” he said, referring to the severe cuts headed to public health.

“I don’t want to sound naive here,” I said, “but isn’t that extremely unjust?”

Kenneth raised his eyebrows. “That’s a good question, but here’s the sad reality: the poor don’t vote.”

Of course, the very first time I wore my Ukrainian necklace, I had to come across a scary Russian – speaking nurse. A Russian speaker in St. Louis always means a Jewish immigrant. And as much as Jews support Ukraine back in Ukraine, Jewish Russian -speaking immigrants are as Putinoid as one can possibly be.

The reason for this is obvious. Russian – speakers find it extraordinarily hard to adapt after emigration. They don’t feel comfortable in their new countries and lash back in confused anger. And what’s a better way to lash out against the United States than to adopt Putin’s Obama – hating Ukraine – bashing anti-Western propaganda?

Today is also the day when the doctor’s office chose to greet me like this:

I’m not that into candy but after abstaining from food for 14 hours and from water for 3, I’m ready to stuff any food I come across into my mouth.

As you probably know, I believe there are writers and authors. Writers create art. Authors produce commercial crap for entertainment purposes. Make no mistake, I’m all for commercial crap. I’m a huge fan of mystery novels, for instance, and feel grateful to their authors for entertaining me.

What really creeps me out, though, is when creators of entertainment fare berate other creators of entertainment fare for not producing great literature. What can be more ridiculous than somebody like Ursula Le Guin ranting against “packaged microwavable fiction [that] ruins the taste, destabilizes the moral blood pressure, and makes the mind obese”? She made a fortune out of selling precisely this kind of product. There is zero reason for her to feel condescending towards others who do the same.