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Midweek Staff Meeting – CPA


Prose-1 (1)Not ‘certified public accountant,’ ‘continuous partial attention,’ the internet affliction.

The god of writers. My totem would be an etching of the prophet Gad, one of the prophets who advised King David. He appears briefly in the Book of Samuel, but there is supposed to be a lost book called ‘The Book of Gad the Seer’ that is mentioned in the Chronicles, but which no one has seen since before… well, a long a freaking time. Gad stopped a plague once, apparently, but really doesn’t have much association with writing. Heck, we don’t even has his book.

We still don’t have a philosopher-king (or philosopher-prime minister, but that’s partly because we don’t have prime ministers in America, which, we possibly should, but that’s another discussion, the advantages and disadvantages of the parliamentary versus presidential systems; could one describe [depict?] Obama as a sort of philosopher-president; maybe, but, as much as he’s mocked as an egghead, he’s really more in the evangelical of the educated preacher, rather than the public intellectual; no, you’d have to go back to founding figures like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to find our philosopoher-presidents, I think). But I do remember reading Michael Ignatieff’s editorials. I don’t remember being impressed. If I recall, he had kind of a Thomas Friedman thing going on, and, really, for pundits, is there any more grievous insult than being compared to Thomas Friedman. I mean, without getting deep into the downright idiotic chaff, like Ross ‘the neckbeard’ Douthat or ridiculously stupid and offensive figures like Cohen.

A cri de coeur for a return to polymathy. No. Seriously. Which is cool, because I’m probably closer to being a polymath than I am to being a specialist.

Happiness sucks. There. I’ve said it.

I’m just getting started!

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Midweek Staff Meeting – They Can Take It Away Whenever They Want To


In the ‘cloud,’ corporations own everything you think own (and everything you used to own).

The next American winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Academic a–holes.

A very earthy sort of ‘vie boheme’ near Covent Gardens in the eighteenth century.

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Weekend Reading – What Use Are You?


The slow death of the humanities in the university.

I see nothing wrong with conflating coffee and sex. In fact, I’m also going to start using the word ‘coffee’ when I mean ‘sex.’ However, I will still continue to use ‘coffee’ to mean ‘coffee.’ I apologize in advance for any confusion this may cause.

Some suggested careers for me.

You have been reading it wrong this whole time. Unless you’ve never read Beowulf, in which case… well, really, the question becomes, why haven’t you? It’s a foundational work of western literature and it’s widely available. The late, Nobel prize winning Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, wrote a wonderful and, I might add, readable translation of the Old English poem. I know that the article this links specifically name drops Heaney as one of the translators who got that first line wrong, but even assuming this fellow is right, you can just redo those first lines in your head as you read it.

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Weekend Reading – Smackdowns


Poetry slams do nothing for poetry.

A well rounded education is useless! You must submit to the almighty market!

Someone’s got a problem with Kevin Young.

Death is helping to keep the typewriter alive.

The Chomsky-Zizek death match.

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Midweek Staff Meeting – Why Ask Why


Why study English? Because it’s awesome.

The Great Oakland Hipster Flight of 2013.

Bach’s great love letter to Christ.

Kickstart for indie bookstores.

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Monday Morning Staff Meeting – What A Disappointment


Rilke was a jerk.

Walking, literarily.

Teach for America is failure as an educational program, but a successful Trojan horse on behalf of for-profit corporations.

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Weekend Reading – Publish Or Perish


Helping protect the intellectual labors of new PhDs.

Poetry’s public.

Abramson’s dichotomies.

it’s piffle.

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Midweek Staff Meeting – Another One Bites The Dust


iPod sound quality sucks.

Attacking outsider art.

The lost art of memorizing poetry.

Tom Friedman is a demented, Ayn Rand wannabe with a veneer pseudo-liberalism.

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Midweek Staff Meeting – You Could Always Be Wrong


Ex Cathedra and fallibilism.

Study philosophy. Get a decent job. In that order.

Freedom is just another word for French existentialism.

The typewriter and Modernism are behind the very notion of ‘revising your work.’

A new defense of poetry.

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Midweek Staff Meeting – Congratulations, DC!


Yes! Washington, DC does, in fact, lead the nation in per capita Starbucks! Also in literacy and college education, but still – Starbucks!!!

Isn’t the better question, why don’t we do it?

Whoever you are. No matter how cool you are. Your facebook needs this.