Happy New Year!

 Happy New Year and all best wishes for 2012!Feliz año nuevoFeliz Ano NovoBonne annéeBuon Anno Nuovo / Felice Anno NuovoKull 'aam wa-antum bikhayrAliheli'sdi Itse UdetiyvasadisvNa MwakaMweru wi GikenoFeliĉan novan jaron聖誕快樂 新年快樂 [圣诞快乐 新年快乐]Bliain úr faoi shéan is faoi mise duitNava Varsh Ki Haardik Shubh KaamnaayenEin gesundes neues JahrMwaka MwenaPudhu Varusha VaazhthukkalAfe nhyia paUfaaveri aa aharehEr sala we pîroz beسال نوС наступающим...

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Remembering a Hero: John G. Lawrence

Garner & LawrenceOne of two key figures in a momentous case that is still too little discussed passed on November 20, 2011, to no public notice: John Geddes Lawrence.Who?The Lawrence of Lawrence v. Texas, the legal case that went to the US Supreme Court, which in 2003 ruled, in a momentous 6-3 decision written by Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, in Lawrence's and co-plaintiff Tyrone Garner's favor, consequently striking down Texas's anti-sodomy...

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Quartet: Chamberlain / Frankenthaler / Rivers / Havel

Last Wednesday, the sculptor and plastic artist John Chamberlain passed away. He was 84. I always think of him as Mr. Crushed Cars, though he worked in media other than, well, crushed scrap metal from cars. But what he could do with car parts! I often perceive a physical lightness (akin to the wittiness of their names) in his sculptures that is quite at odds with the weightiness of their materials and materiality.  Interstellar flowers, often...

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Some iPhone/iPad Drawings

I've drawn very few of my little and bigger portraits since the summer, but here are a few of those and one or two new ones. As always, most are life drawings (save the Sagat portrait--I think I drew his face too long and not wide enough--and the final one, based on an photo of football player Dez Bryant), done in one sitting (or, more usually), standing.Woman in café, Manhattan (iPad)Actor/porn star, François Sagat (iPad)Young man on PATH (iPhone)Man...

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On The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry

First, I have not yet done more than glance at this anthology but, as a major hullabaloo has arisen around it, here are some links, with a little commentary, tell the story.Rita Dove, a poet I know (a little) and admire greatly, edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (New York: Penguin, 2011). For those who may not be aware of her background, Dove is the author of 9 books of poetry, the third of which received the 1987...

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Happy Holidays

Joyeuses Fêtes! Felices Fiestas! Sikukuu Njema! Trevlig Helg! Boas Festas! สวัสดีปีใหม่! Selamat Hari Raya! Mutlu Bayramlar! 假期愉快! Sarbatori Fericite! გილოცავთ ახალ წელს! Wesołych Świąt! חג שמח! Jie Ri Yu Kuai! Bones Festes! Yeni yılınız kutlu olsun! С праздником! Aw ni san'kura! Gleðilega hátíð! Mele Kalikimaka! 楽しいホリデーシーズンを! Buone Feste! Καλές δικακοπές!  عید مبارک! Nghỉ lễ vui vẻ! Ii holide eximnandi! Gledelig høytid! Весели празници! आपकी...

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Photo: The Kiss

V-J Day in Times Square © Alfred Eisenstaedt (Life, 1945)Marissa Gaeta (left) kisses fellow US naval officer Citlalic Snell Photograph: MC2 Joshua Mann/AFP/Getty Ima...

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Tanta Saudade: Cesaria Evora

Reading Fly Brother's blog entry today reminded me that back in the early 1990s, two different friends introduced me to the music of Cesária Évora (b. 1941), whose renditions of morna, a Blues-like musical form, and the more upbeat caldeira, both from her her native Cape Verde, made her and these genres global sensations some thirty years ago. Évora began singing in the 1960s, but gained international acclaim only after recording her first album,...

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1/2 US Near Destitution + Acemoglu on Inequality

I don't spend much time in the precincts of the 1%, so it was no surprise to me to read back in the New York Times back in November that according the US Census figures, in 2010, 1 in 3 Americans, or around 100 million Americans, adults and children, were economically just above or already below the poverty line. The Times article focused on how an alternative measure of the US economic situation that adjusted for cost of...

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Iraq War (Finally) Over + Hitchens Passes

Panetta, in IraqThis is the way the war ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.  And though American troops are still there, though in severely reduced numbers, the Iraq War, one of the US's worst foreign policy and political blunders, has finally wound down to its sad end.  The Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, yesterday traveled to Iraq to declare the military mission officially...

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Oscar Niemeyer Turns 104

Grades are in, and now it's letters of recommendation time, a few more graduate projects to read, and final preparations for the new quarter, which begins January 3. Yes, you read that correctly. A swift little break this will be...half of it spent at the library!+++There are octogenarians among us who continue to create, nonagenarians still at their art, and, believe it or not, centenarians too who are practicing their craft. One is the Brazilian...

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Quote: Yoruba Folktale

Thus Elenuobere was acquitted and absolved from his labours. The mouth that had put him into trouble had talked him out of it again. Nevertheless my friend, it is wiser not to open your mouth too wide. For it is always easier to talk yourself into trouble than to talk yourself out of it.--Copyright © Bakare Gbadamosi and Ulli Beier, from "The mouth that commits an offence must talk itself out of punishment" in Not even God is ripe enough: Yoruba...

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Quote & Excerpt: Sahar Tawfiq

"She went to Tahrir Square, ascended the steps to the pedestrian bridge which encircled the vast roundabout, walked around it several times. She felt tired, and thought about sitting on the steps. She descended and walked to the corniche. The old man was sitting there, reading a book."She wished she could sit beside him and read with him. She longed for him to read to her in a calm and sympathetic voice, while she listened to him and gazed at the...

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Thursday Hodgepodge (Obama in Osawatomie, Gingrich Ascends, Pujols Departs, etc.)

Very little posting these days, because it's exam week, and it has been a nonstrop reading extravaganza since September, though the pace has accelerated over the last few weeks as so many things appear on my desk and must be addressed, ASAP.  A few thoughts on various things going on, below.*** I was stunned to read about the shooting earlier today at Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University).  According to the...

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On a Word In ZZ Packer's Story: Drupes

Last month, as my advanced undergraduate fiction students and I were reading ZZ Packer's stories, I drew a little box around a word she uses in the first paragraph of "Doris Is Coming," her beautiful evocation of a young woman's personal, public political protest against segregation in the early 1960s: "drupes." This word caught my attention because it both stood out--though I don't think any of the students mentioned it in particular--as yet another...

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Quote: Jim Baital

"In the army, Tali did not find life as simple as he had expected. There was very little freedom, and he could not do anything without someone telling him off."'All right you lazybones, get up and get a move on', ordered the sergeant. They bounced out of their beds, jumped to their feet, and as birds scatter, starting from one end to the other, so did the soldiers, as the sergeant marched down the corridor. The sound of fluttering clothes, of running...

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Nicanor Parra Wins Cervantes Prize

What is an antipoet? That answer I'll leave to someone else, but a self-styled holder of that moniker, the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra (1914-), a trained mathematician and physicist who has been publishing since the 1930s and whose 1954 collection Poemas y Antipoemas electrified readers across the globe, yesterday received the 2011 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, widely considered the highest honor in Spanish-language literature.Parra has famously rejected...

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What Is a Publisher? or, Changes in Scholarly Publishing

Work, and not post-turkey recovery keeps me from these pages. We're now in reading week, which means conferences with the undergraduates, honors and theses manuscripts and other program and departmental materials to read, and final preparation for next quarter, which begins January 3, 2012. Brief indeed will be my break.  I am trying to complete a syllabus for a new course, one of three I'll be teaching come January, which falls under the department's...

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