Monthly Archives: December 2007

This month’s PsychoSlut column is about Volume III of the Standard Edition: Early Psycho-Analytic Publications, which means it’s about the moment when Freud has, on the one hand, started to figure out repression, but, on the other hand, still subscribes … Continue reading →

Last Thursday, “Lisa Douglas” published a Chronicle first-person narrative on “The Trailing Ex-Spouse”: The plight of the trailing spouse whose marriage subsequently dissolves and the former spouse (whom the dept. had hired first) moves on.  It’s usually difficult when a … Continue reading →

At Bookslut this month, I have an interview with Christopher Lane about his new book, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale UP, 2007).  From the interview: You have a great deal of fun with the psychiatrists for their … Continue reading →

Yesterday’s mail brought a welcome break from holiday catalogs: contributor’s copies of Mid-American Review.  I’ve got a review of Robert Lopez’s terrific short novel, Part of the World (Calamari Press).   Here’s the opening: Part of the World is a gripping … Continue reading →

It turns out that it’s bad karma to talk smack to your mother.  In the morning, when we were all going out to “shovel” the quarter-inch of snow so we could play basketball, The Little Man was slightly irritated about … Continue reading →

At PopMatters this morning, I have a (slightly tardy) review of Darren Wershler-Henry’s recent book, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting:  The Iron Whim‘s thesis is that the iconography of typewriting is almost preternaturally self-deconstructing. Typewriting produces the … Continue reading →

Via Paraphernalian, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography advent calendar/contest.

Attention future students in my Brit Lit II (and perhaps The Victorian Age) courses:  When it’s time to sit the exam on the Victorian period, you can count on the following question appearing as extra credit:  Why can’t Tennyson’s famous … Continue reading →