Fall 2012

Beginning on Monday (wow the summer stormed by) I will be teaching 2 courses at the University of Pittsburgh during the fall semester: Seminar in Composition (ENGCMP 0200, Pitt’s freshman English) and Reading Poetry (ENGLIT 0315). I am greatly looking forward to both classes as each should prove to be interesting, challenging, and fun. In Seminar in Composition we’ll be reading selections from the following:

David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky eds., Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, 9th ed. (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010).

William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White, The Elements of Style: With Revisions, an Introduction, and a Chapter on Writing, 4th ed. (New York: Longman, 2000).

David Foster Wallace,  A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1997).

 

And, among a number of other poems and poets, in Reading Poetry we’ll primarily be looking at:

John Ashbery,  Selected Poems (New York: Penguin, 1986).

Ben Lerner, The Lichtenberg Figures (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2004).

Robert Lowell, Life Studies and For the Union Dead (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007).

Harryette Mullen, Recylcopdeia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2006).

T.S. Eliot The Wasteland (Norton Critical Edition), ed. Michael North (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001).

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself and Other Poems, ed. Robert Haas and Paul Ebenkamp (Counterpoint: Berkeley, 2011).

On the Beginning (a rare subject)

io9 has two new articles re: the beginning of the universe. The first is on the James Webb Telescope, to be completed by 2018. According to Michael Shara “[The James Webb Space Telescope] has, in many ways, 100 times the capabilities that the Hubble Space Telescope does. We’re actually going to be able to see the first stars forming, the first galaxies forming after the Big Bang. We’re also going to be able to — we think — directly image planets orbiting other stars.” The James Webb Telescope may allow astrophysicists to observe the very beginnings of the universe, something that (at least I) thought was as impossible as seeing the end of the universe. Perhaps Frank Kermode’s statement that humans live in “the middest,” w/o access to our beginnings or endings, will have to be revised if we actually can observe the origin of the universe. (And what if there’s a little dude wearing a fig leaf waving at us when we observe events shortly following the Big Bang?)

Second (speaking of the Big Bang), physicists are now theorizing that “the start of the universe should not be modeled as a Big Bang, but rather like a Big Freeze — akin to water transforming into ice.”

Archiving Every Bomb the United States Has EVER Dropped

Bryan Bender at the Boston Globe reports how Lieutenant Colonel Jenns Robertson has assembled a report on every bomb the US has ever dropped since WWI(!!!), “a compilation that, at the click of a mouse and a few keystrokes, reveals for the first time the sheer magnitude of destruction inflicted by the US and its allies from the air in the last century.” Going by the name: Theater History of Operations Reports (or THOR), this hyperarchive of US military violence is truly staggering. “One particularly relevant example: From October 1965 to May 1975, at least 456,365 cluster bombs were dropped on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, according to the records analyzed.”