University Diaries
A professor of English describes American university life.
A professor of English describes American university life.
March 1, 2011 - 1:33pm
A week that features Bernard Madoff denouncing people for being greedy, and Moammar Gaddafi delivering a sermon on love, can only be encompassed by a return to that ur-text of our time, Ubu the King.
Comments
February 27, 2011 - 5:33pm
I'd like to reflect on a couple of passages from Mark Lilla's The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics.
February 10, 2011 - 8:01am
I had glancing, and wounding, encounters with Christopher Lasch in the early 'eighties. He was a close friend of an old boyfriend of mine, and when I moved to Rochester, New York, I went with an introduction to Lasch from the boyfriend. "I've told Kit you're there," he'd said to me. "Give him a call. He's expecting it."
January 5, 2011 - 1:27pm
In his short memoir, The Memory Chalet, dictated at the end of his life as he lay immobilized from motor neuron disease, the historian Tony Judt three times uses the word solipsism. It's a curious and exotic word, and its repeated use in Judt's brief final statement to the world conveys both his deepest fear about the future of politics, and his horror at his own locked-in condition.
December 14, 2010 - 5:37pm
Emile Durkheim, the great French sociologist, tells us that there are four kinds of suicide. None of the four really gets at the sort of suicide Bernard Madoff's son committed. New ways of life create new paths to death.
