photo: Jena Priebe, "The Secret Lives of Books" from the Bibliothecaphilia exhibit at Mass MoCA, August 2015 — photo: Jena Priebe, "The Secret Lives of Books" from the Bibliothecaphilia exhibit at Mass MoCA, August 2015

Back-to-School Blues: Notes from an Erstwhile Grad Student

September 23, 2015 in self reflective

For many of our younger years, the back-to-school season is one filled with turbulence and excitement. Even long after we've graduated and left the academic calendar behind, there's often a certain irrepressible, nostalgic frisson that comes on around the first weeks of September, alongside the clichéd images of fresh pencils and school buses. For me, the magic lasted longer than for most other people, since I went back to graduate school just two years after graduating from college. I started a masters program in English literature in 2009 and moved on to a PhD program just a year later. That meant that starting in fall 2010, not only did back-to-school mean back to classes for me, it also meant back to teaching. If you think fall is thrilling and nerve-wracking as a student, just try it as a brand-new teacher.

Undercover

September 22, 2015 in reviews/recommendations

I'm not going to make commentary on Taylor Swift into my personal #brand or anything, but I did want to write a few words about this week's development in Swiftiana: Ryan Adams' entire-album cover of 1989.

The Confessional Poetics of Taylor Swift, or: Does Too Much Knowledge Ruin Art?

April 22, 2015 in literary analysis

I wanted to write up some quick notes about something that I've been thinking about a lot this past week. The topic came up in conversation with my friend Margaret in conjunction with an episode she recently recorded for my favorite podcast, NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. (We had our conversation before the episode went live; I then listened to the episode and later we continued the conversation on Twitter.) On the episode in question (which is great, as all of that show is great), one of the topics discussed was credulity, mostly in terms of what elements of pop culture strain credulity for a person when they show up. As Margaret defined the term in this context, credulity is invoked when "some amount of knowledge you have about the subject at hand interferes with how you're capable of consuming the show or song or sporting event or anything...any time your real-world information is interfering with your ability to consume this artificial, constructed simulation."