(Crossposted at Arcade.)
Continuing my progressive descent into vulgar materialism (I use the words "progressive" and "vulgar" in positive senses!), I’d like to continue the line of thinking of my previous post, "Reading under Neoliberalism." I will use the questions Joel Burges asks in a comment to guide my reflections here. His questions are [...]

(Crossposted at Arcade.)
I remember hearing once that FBI agents who had wiretaps on various mafia operations noted a change in the speaking style of the gangsters they were monitoring after Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather was released in 1972.  The real gangsters began imitating the patois of their film counterparts, thoroughly identifying with their brutal ethos. 
 
Today, I [...]

I’ve managed to import my old blogger postings to WordPress, but I still can’t quite import my XML export file containing everything I’ve written since I switched to this site.  I hope to resolve this problem shortly, and restore all the shiny design elements while I’m at it.

Please excuse the blankness of this page as I fix some errors with my site.  We’ll be live again, ASAP.

To prep for the next diss. chapter, on the figure of the "believer," I’ve been reading lots of lit crit on metafiction and, in an unrelated line of reading, have been simultaneously perusing Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, a terrific book on economic development that blows neo-liberal free-market orthodoxies more or less out of the political-economic [...]

Well, for instance:  …if you really do have a chronic problem with typos and off-seeming sentences in early drafts of your writing.
Since I turned in my hipster chapter, I’ve been going over it again and again, finding (what seem to me) terrible typos and clunker phrases. At one point, I accidentally used of the term [...]

Last night, I mailed my revised hipster chapter to my dissertation advisors and to some other people I thought might be interested in reading it.  Today, I’ve been feeling intellectually lazy and hung over.
I’m cleansing the mental palate by reading Charles Johnson’s 1999 novel, Dreamer, a fictionalized rendition of the last two years of Martin [...]

I finished my hipster chapter on Saturday, at least a draft of it.  Only took me a year to write.  It weighs in at about 75 pages, and overall I’m pretty happy with how it came out.  One more major chapter to go–another 75-80 page chapter, on the postironic figure of the believer.  I believe.  [...]

Forget Obama as a postironic candidate. What we have here is a prospective presidency that only a flat-out ironist could love.

But Mr McCain has serious handicaps, too. One is his temper. “It is startling to contemplate how violent John McCain was well into his 20s,” notes Matt Welch, a critical biographer. Drunk on shore [...]