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Today, Julie and I decided to have lunch at a new “gourmet hamburger” joint on College Avenue in Palo Alto called “The Counter.” When we entered The Counter a chipper and well-groomed girl welcomed us, showed us to our seat, and asked “Have you been to the counter before?” When we said no, she proceeded … Continue reading The Birth of American Fusion Food

I read for the first time James Wood’s essay on hysterical realism in his book of criticism, The Irresponsible Self. I had heard the term frequently for a few years now–and had a reasonable sense of what it meant, and that Wood had coined the term as a response to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth–but I … Continue reading Thoughts on Hysterical Realism

After sorting through about a dozen remarkably smart and on-target abstracts for the MLA, we’ve decided that we couldn’t resist saying yes to more than one. What this means is that “Postirony in Theory and Fiction” will now have a total of four participants (Linda Hutcheon, who initially signed on during the application phase, found … Continue reading Postirony in Theory and Fiction (MLA)

The MLA special session that I helped organized, “Postirony in Theory and Fiction,” has been transforming in the last few weeks. One of our panelists found himself unable to participate in the special session after he got a job with a university press. This forced me to put out a call for papers for a … Continue reading Postirony at the MLA

… is out today.  My copy, which I ordered from Amazon back in November, is somewhere in Richmond, CA, at the moment.  Initial reviews are not so good.  Reviewers are calling the book too long, rambling, aimless, incoherent, Pynchon imitating his own, better novels, and sophomoric in its humor.  Well, even if it’s all those … Continue reading Against the Day…

I’ve added a new plugin to Firefox that automatically allows me to add blog entries to this account.  Let’s see if this increases the frequency of my blogging. Continue reading New Plugins

I’m working on The Savage Girl portion of my chapter now–the part that will become the basis of the talk that I’ll be giving at the MLA this December. It’s a funny thing to actually be analyzing a novel in writing again after all these years of preparation, orals, colloquial promises that I would be … Continue reading I write and write…

I received an email today from someone who pointed me to a wikipedia article called “Post-irony“. The entry reads as follows: Post-irony is a point of view that involves the self-conscious appreciation of what would otherwise be seen as cheesy or ridiculous. One early reference to this mindset is in a 1999 Slate article. The … Continue reading Postirony on Wikipedia

I’ve been working on a chapter of my dissertation that will become the basis for my MLA talk in December. I emailed Alex Shakar, one of the authors I’m discussing in this chapter, to ask him about some of the sources he was reading at the time that he wrote The Savage Girl. He very … Continue reading Brands and Irony

On Saturday, my long trip away from the Bay Area will be coming to an end. Since the end of May, I’ve visited New York, London, Berlin, Copenhagen, Arhus (also in Denmark), New York, D.C., Boston, and New York again–in more or less that order. I’ve had a productive and enjoyable summer–not only in terms … Continue reading Returning to the Academiland