yeshe chölwa

At theology camp, it was important to seem busy, so we were — the days were just packed. We would have breakfast at seven, woken up by reggae versions of non-reggae songs. Breakfast… Read More →

R.I.P. “proto-modernism”

If you’ve ever taken a college-level English course on literature written before 1900, the odds are pretty good that you’ve encountered a strange beast known as “the proto-modernist text.” Very often, this is… Read More →

In Which Our Hero Resolves The Question of Nature vs. Nurture

(x-posted to The Valve, of course) Nature versus nurture, Lodge. Nature always wins. –Secretary William Cleary, Wedding Crashers Jenny Davidson’s new book of cultural criticism, entitled Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth… Read More →

The Shape of Things To Come: On ‘Literary Thinking and the New Left’

(x-posted to The Valve) What follows may appear to be a discussion of the 1960s in America; it is not. Reading through Sean McCann and Michael Szalay’s indispensable essay “Do You Believe in… Read More →

Look Back In Anger: The Death of Literary Studies

(x-posted to The Valve) Amardeep Singh at The Valve drew my attention to this article by William Deresiewicz, writing for The Nation, and also to the outstanding response written by CR and posted… Read More →

The Return of the SoCal Bloggers: Tomemos, Uncomplicatedly, Girl Detective, Surlacarte

Dear readers, Happy new year! Blogging is a reflection of brick-and-mortar communities, and it creates and sustains new communities of its own. Discussions begin through blogging that could never have happened otherwise, and… Read More →

The Best and Worst of Intellectual Blogs 2007

(x-posted to The Valve) What a very long year it’s been. It’s been a year shaped by the evolution of political discourse in this country and around the world. Here, as people grew… Read More →

Academic Blogging Revisited

(x-posted to The Valve) Dear readers, It’s been a little more than a year since I began blogging under my own name, began contributing to The Valve, and generally took my first steps… Read More →

Gee, Officer Krupke: Disillusionment with Reflexivity

(x-posted to The Valve) (N.B. As I prepare simultaneously for a dissertation that will be grappling with the rise of self-help, and a post about sex and love, I find myself reading a… Read More →

There Is No Such Thing As Intelligence

(x-posted to The Valve) The abstract personal definition of “intelligence,” reified in our minds thanks to IQ tests and their derivatives, is a source of social ills and should be abandoned. It impedes… Read More →