Here is an instrumental version of my most recent work, "Cara Paul Mad Dog Rachele," recorded using very expensive, state-of-the-art computer technology which has been made to sound like a $30 Casio keyboard, or like a streaming MIDI file on a e-card website, through nothing short of hours of ingenuity on my part. Control click (Windows: right ( Read more... )

So I have written her this song. I will post an mp3 when I get a chance. And some webspace. For the time being, suffice it to say that it is in 3/4, in Bb major, with a jaunty, Italian street musician feel, and should properly be sung with a thick but very obviously fake Italian accent ( Read more... )

WARNING: RUSSIAN LITERATURE SPOILER ( Read more... )

Someone recently said that this journal was rapidly deteriorating into a Lit. Theory blog, an accusation which struck me deep to the heart. Nevertheless, I feel the need to point out that there's an interesting discussion of Oscar Wilde's aesthetics of imitation here, which may be the most interesting and important thing on the internet, hands ( Read more... )

Quick: what is the only vegetable currently in my refrigerator/freezer?

To all Bardian or post-Bardian readers of this page, I kindly direct your attention to this hymn to one of our own.

At a noted East Village bookshop with a deliriously good collection of literary magazines, I decided to wean myself from their pulpy lure [pulpy pap?--ed.] and go browse through the real literature. Perusing Fiction among the A's, I came across this sign: Auster is at the information desk. I moved slightly to my right, and found: Bukowski is at ( Read more... )

Linguistic theories on "code-switching" and the internal logic of bilingualism bedamned: there may be rhyme, but there is no reason to the way minds regurgitate the languages they know. To wit -- several weeks ago I was awakened in my sixth floor apartment by the surprising weight of a squirrel, perched momentarily on my shoulder. Quickly abreast ( Read more... )

Midterm; 17th C. Lit. I filled two blue books (which were, in fact, bright yellow), and nevertheless left with a vaguely empty feeling. The test was divided into two parts: the first was a close reading of a Donne Sonnet (X) -- my reading was not what I would call close, although I did manage to point out that the violence of the poem is ( Read more... )

A year or so ago I would have been saddened by Derrida's death for only one reason: the recently dead make lousy targets in the world of academe; if one insists on violent academic revolution (and until recently, I saw Grad School as little more than an occasion for the blood of postmodernists and deconstructionists to irrigate my fields, to use a ( Read more... )