| Title |
Excerpt |
Author |
Date |
Total Comments |
Recent Comment |
| On Meditation As A Western Practice |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) Many of the people I know, myself included, have tried meditating at some point in their lives. I know some people who have gone to meditation retreats for days or weeks. I don’t currently meditate, but I have been considering starting up again. I’m finding it… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
02/04/10 |
25 |
02/11/10 |
| I Don’t Care What The Critics Say, I Love Mad Men (and the Sopranos and the Hills) |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) I’ve just finished Scott Kaufman’s very enjoyable post, “Don Draper as an unraptured Emma Bovary,” and feel moved to respond. Scott observes, quite insightfully, that the difference between Don Draper and other, younger characters on the show, including Pete Campbell and Peggy Olson, is that Draper… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
01/16/10 |
9 |
01/24/10 |
| Mary Karr: Writing in the Absence of Truth |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) I’ve just finished Mary Karr’s new memoir, Lit, about her young adulthood. I read it for a lot of reasons: it was one of the NY Times’s best books of the year, it is about a young writer and academic, and it narrates a journey from… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
01/13/10 |
9 |
01/15/10 |
| Avatar: The Film That’s Good For Somebody Else |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) A lot has already been written, at the speed of the Internet, about Avatar, and much of it has been great. I was very impressed by Aaron Bady and Gerry Canavan’s posts for the Valve, and you should go there if you want polished, whip-smart criticism… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
01/05/10 |
21 |
01/24/10 |
| Don’t Know Much About Politics: Tough Questions About The UC Walkout and the Cultural Studies Debate |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) In the course of a single week, we have seen academics making noise on several different fronts related to politics. First of all, here in California, there has been a large-scale effort to protest against the drastic budget cuts affecting students, workers, and faculty at University… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
09/28/09 |
12 |
11/02/09 |
| Bathos on the Big Screen: Jurassic Park and Sons of Anarchy |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) Years ago, I remember my father saying that he had managed to watch Pulp Fiction because it was a “comic book.” I hadn’t been able to make it all the way through, because I was sickened—I mean physically, not in some abstract moral sense—by the violence… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
09/28/09 |
5 |
09/28/09 |
| A Dream I Had After Watching Star Trek |
In this scene, young James Kirk is fighting, wenching, and drinking his way across Iowa, when suddenly… OLD GUY WHO GETS THE BRAIN LEECHES LATER: We need you to be a starship trooper! Your standardized test scores are way off the charts! JAMES KIRK: I don’t remember taking any standardized tests!… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
06/01/09 |
0 |
|
| On Breeding, Post VII: In Which Our Hero Resolves the Nature vs. Nurture Question |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) Nature versus nurture, Lodge. Nature always wins. --Secretary William Cleary, Wedding Crashers Jenny Davidson’s new book of cultural criticism, entitled Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century, is one of the strangest and most elliptical works of its kind I’ve ever read. I say this… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
06/01/09 |
2 |
06/04/09 |
| A follow up: the university as it could be |
x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes I thought I’d give us two glimpses of what higher learning might look like if we followed Mark Taylor’s excellent advice about “ending the university as we know it” in favor of a non-specialized, interdisciplinary series of collaborations. These are based on experiences from the past… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
05/02/09 |
1 |
05/02/09 |
| An op-ed so bad, we had to post on it twice |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) Dear readers: every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in. I don’t know why the New York Times published Mark Taylor’s op-ed on “ending the university.” If they hadn’t done so, I could have kept on with the work of figuring… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
05/01/09 |
8 |
05/02/09 |
| A Music Post: To Fix The Gash In Your Head |
(Cross-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes.) You know when you get so tense and anxiety-ridden that all the nerves at the back of your neck snarl up into one burning ball? Well, if that gland could make music, it would sound like this album. –Lester Bangs, from “Monolith or Monotone? Lou Reed’s… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
02/23/09 |
3 |
02/24/09 |
| I’m Simply Wild About That Sled |
(Cross-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes.) So you know how Citizen Kane, over time, with the exception of that White Stripes song that quotes it, has slowly boiled down to the fact that “Rosebud” is the name of his sled? Well, a friend referenced that fact today, and it struck me that… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
02/20/09 |
16 |
02/23/09 |
| Those Obscene Octuplets |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) Greetings from California, where, as is now very widely known, people do crazy things with the help of doctors, up to and including giving birth to children 7 through 14 at the same time. Since most people’s interest in the Guinness Book of World Records begins… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
02/03/09 |
16 |
02/11/09 |
| The Rhet/Comp Article “At Least It’s An Ethos…” picked up by Inside Higher Ed |
I like my original title pretty well, but otherwise a much improved version of my recent post “At Least It’s An Ethos” is up at InsideHigherEd, along with an up-to-the-minute stream of commenters in various kinds of apoplectic states. God bless them, every one. Many thanks to IHE for picking up… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
12/23/08 |
12 |
12/31/08 |
| At Least It’s An Ethos: Why Merging Rhetoric With Composition Is A Mistake |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, dude, at least it’s an ethos. -The Big Lebowski After almost five years teaching writing, English, ESL, and humanities survey courses to high school students and undergraduates, I have come to the conclusion that it is… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
12/13/08 |
15 |
12/16/08 |
| A New Blog For You To Read; Also, Mad Men and the Office |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Epsiodes) I utterly recommend the blog Blographia Literaria, if you aren’t reading it already. I just discovered it, courtesy of an interesting and kind (though ultimately critical) response to my previous post on summarizing theory. Via that post, I found Andrew’s reflections on the television shows Mad… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
11/13/08 |
1 |
11/14/08 |
| Derrida’s Obituary, or, Is Literary Theory Too Abstruse? |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) REPORTER: How do you answer the charge that you’re a fascist? WILSON: What? REPORTER: Your band, Joy Division, named after a group of women recruited by the SS for the purpose of breeding perfect Aryans. Isn’t that sick. WILSON: Have you never heard of situationism, or… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
11/02/08 |
59 |
11/25/08 |
| A post in which we go from graffiti to meta-graffiti and maybe meta-infinity |
The meta-graffiti is below the fold. |
Joseph Kugelmass |
10/27/08 |
3 |
10/28/08 |
| Academics, Political Scholarship, and Jonah Goldberg |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) Over at Acephalous (and at The Edge of the American West), Scott Kaufman has posted the text of Friday’s panel presentation on Jonah Goldberg (Liberal Fascism) and the right-wing version of what we might call “political scholarship,” a genre that (taken loosely) might also include K.… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
10/27/08 |
41 |
10/31/08 |
| Time Must Have A Stop |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) At least three ABD students, myself included, are currently working on James Joyce at UC Irvine; all of them are working on Joyce’s representations of time, particularly the tension in his novels between diachronic (linear) time, the usual sort, and synchronic (simultaneous) time. I expected, of… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
10/18/08 |
12 |
10/22/08 |
| Question for our readers: Intelligences vaster than our own? |
Dear readers, The following is a question from a colleague of mine, one that perhaps you are itching to answer: “I’m looking for literary examples of an individual and/or ‘man’ coming into contact with an alien intelligence so far beyond comprehension that human life becomes, by comparison, insignificant and beyond morality… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
10/13/08 |
67 |
10/28/08 |
| The idea of order and the problem of Stravinsky |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) The heated, often deeply antagonistic exchange that has developed in the comments to my post on David Foster Wallace reminds me of something from the recent past of my graduate studies. Tom Mellers writes: [Kugelmass] should possibly watch a little less television, though. I know that… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
10/01/08 |
53 |
10/22/08 |
| On David Foster Wallace |
Over at The Kugelmass Episodes, a reader wrote in asking for a post about David Foster Wallace’s legacy and death, something I’ve been considering and before now avoiding. Whereas, when Elliott Smith died, I was able to write in honor of a performer I had always admired, Wallace was an enormous… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
09/25/08 |
52 |
10/06/08 |
| Whatever Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stranger: On Heath Ledger’s Joker |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) Dear readers, this is about the film The Dark Knight and will, of necessity, be crammed absolutely full of spoilers. *** It seems we are still too close to The Dark Knight; we are reeling. The critics have generally rated the film very high, which is… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
07/24/08 |
7 |
08/11/08 |
| The Shape of Things To Come: On ‘Literary Thinking and the New Left’ |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) What follows may appear to be a discussion of the 1960s in America; it is not. Reading through Sean McCann and Michael Szalay’s indispensable essay “Do You Believe in Magic?”, cited and quoted by Scott Kaufman here and here (with follow-up in the comments by Sean),… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
06/29/08 |
13 |
07/04/08 |
| The Canon, The Critic, The Fetish, and the Pink Slip |
Briefly reflecting on the closing-down of mainstream critical venues, the relevance of the canon, and the question of whether you can evaluate art regardless of how much you like it, or even whether you should evaluate it as opposed to simply analyzing how it works. |
Joseph Kugelmass |
06/06/08 |
31 |
06/20/08 |
| Look Back in Anger: The Death of Literary Studies |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) A little while ago, our own Amardeep Singh drew my attention to this article by William Deresiewicz, writing for The Nation, and also to the outstanding response written by CR and posted to Ads Without Products and Long Sunday. This is Deresiewicz: Twenty years after Professing… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
04/08/08 |
39 |
04/15/08 |
| A Little Something You Can Touch: HBO’s Wire and the Politics of Visual Media |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) Spend some on a little something you can touch. A new car, a new coat...it’s why we get up in the morning. -The Greek You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way. -Marlo Talking about The Wire, which most of the people… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
03/20/08 |
23 |
03/25/08 |
| Forgotten Satiric Genius, courtesy of Theodor Adorno |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) About two-thirds of the way through Theodor Adorno’s admirable book The Jargon of Authenticity, illuminating the entire volume, is a little piece of German satire that nobody has ever heard of: Christian Schütze’s “Stenciled Speech for Festive Occasions.” Its relevance to the present moment is astonishing,… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
03/03/08 |
9 |
03/12/08 |
| The Scientistic Fallacy: Peter Kramer, Judith Warner, and the Debate Over Psychiatric Medication |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) For scholars in the humanities, there is no way to avoid reflecting on what’s ahead for the discipline, a question that branches in two directions. First, how do scholars respond to the perception that they need increasing amounts of “hard evidence,” particularly historical evidence and cognitive… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
02/29/08 |
4 |
03/01/08 |
| Why Americans Didn’t Watch The Oscars |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) The Oscars mean two things to most Americans. First, it’s a chance to celebrate the most impressive films of the year, from a mainstream point of view. We wash ourselves clean of forgettable trash like Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and look back (through… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
02/28/08 |
6 |
03/08/08 |
| Larval Subjects on Pedagogy |
I highly recommend that you check out Sinthome’s response to my tag about teaching. He teaches philosophy, and this remarkable post synthesizes the Socratic value of provocation, alienating others from their habitus, with the healthy alienation and skepticism many of us felt during our own student years—something to which it is… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
02/08/08 |
13 |
02/11/08 |
| The Talented Mr. Student: Books, Class, and “Passing” |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) This post is a sequel to what I wrote here about teaching literature, and the relationship between literature courses and social class. Readers concerned about the fallout from the conversation may want to read the post here. |
Joseph Kugelmass |
01/29/08 |
27 |
02/11/08 |
| Teaching Literature: The Meme |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) Over at Reassigned Time, Dr. Crazy has written such an odd post that I have to respond in brief. The inspiration for the post was great: why do you teach literature? A White Bear wrote in with some fascinating observations about how her students respond to… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
01/25/08 |
48 |
02/07/08 |
| In Response to Stanley Fish’s 2nd Post on Justifying the Humanities |
Below the fold, my comments on Fish’s new column on the humanities, available here (and footnoted by our own Bill Benzon here). I also submitted the comment directly to the Times. Thanks to tomemos for the initial link. |
Joseph Kugelmass |
01/14/08 |
38 |
01/26/08 |
| In response to Stanley Fish’s “Will The Humanities Save Us?” |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) Bill Benzon calls our attention to a new blog entry by Stanley Fish, posted by The New York Times here. It is easy to imagine how, after a lifetime of dedicated scholarship, an emeritus professor like Fish might react in frustration against the platitudes in Education’s… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
01/08/08 |
61 |
01/14/08 |
| Parodying Academic Blogging |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) Dear readers, In the spirit of the wonderful MLAde 2007, produced by two very funny UC Irvine grad students and distributed, guerrilla-style, around the conference, I’m pleased to present this parody of academic blogging, entitled “My Story.” |
Joseph Kugelmass |
01/05/08 |
1 |
01/06/08 |
| The Best and Worst of Intellectual Blogs 2007 |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) Uncollected thoughts on the year in academic, political, and cultural writing online. |
Joseph Kugelmass |
12/25/07 |
82 |
01/02/08 |
| The Feminist Bookstore video and Yes Means Yes |
That prankster Jessica Valenti, of Feministing, is back at it (in the aftermath of her book Full Frontal Feminism) with an essay collection in progress entitled Yes Means Yes. As sometimes happens, I’ve been busier writing comments than posting; you can read the ongoing discussion at tekanji’s Shrub Blog. Hat tip… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
12/20/07 |
3 |
12/22/07 |
| A Colder Eye: Yeats, Radiohead, and the Economies of Late Style |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) On Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows, William Butler Yeats, and the move away from science fiction and fantasy in their later works. |
Joseph Kugelmass |
12/17/07 |
9 |
01/25/09 |
| Watching I’m Not There |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) Several nights ago, I had the pleasure of watching I’m Not There, the new Bob Dylan movie that excited everyone so much because of the prospect of seeing Cate Blanchett in drag, talking to Allen “David Cross” Ginsburg. The film was initially a gigantic disappointment. I… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
12/05/07 |
3 |
12/06/07 |
| Ratatouille, continued |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) (Bill’s original post on the film is here.) I am melancholy to think of the moment in which this gorgeous, sunset-toned film appears. Every frame of it is washed in romantic pastels, an opulence that alone made it worthwhile to me. To the extent that the… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
11/15/07 |
9 |
12/01/07 |
| ACLA 2008: Literary Character at the Threshold of the City |
Dear readers, The comparativists among you may want to consider joining me for a seminar at this year’s American Comparative Literature Association conference, in the gritty, glamorous city they call Long Beach. My seminar is “Literary Character at the Threshold of the City,” and the description is here, along with links… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
11/14/07 |
2 |
11/18/07 |
| Zizek the Embarrassment |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) “Resistance is Surrender” -Headline of Slavoj Zizek’s new article for The London Review of Books There is a telling moment in the film Zizek! where Zizek discusses his own books, and says that his favorite works are the ones where he manages to consider the philosophical… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
11/09/07 |
142 |
12/07/07 |
| (Radio Interview) These Cats Aren’t Laughing Out Loud |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) (The following are excerpts from a recorded interview between Terri Gross and Lion-O, the young lord of the Thundercats. It was originally aired on National Public Radio and its member affiliates. Lion-O’s essays on culture and feline subjectivity are collected in his first book, The “I”… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
11/03/07 |
1 |
11/05/07 |
| Academic Blogging Revisited |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) It’s been a little more than a year since I began blogging under my own name, began contributing to The Valve, and generally took my first steps towards noticeably academic blogging. It’s a new school year, and the topic of academic blogging is in the air… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
11/01/07 |
13 |
11/02/07 |
| The Haunting Wordsworth: Romantic Poets and Monkeys With Typewriters |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) You might go on extending the list of explanations indefinitely, but you would find, we think, that all the explanations fall into two categories. You will either be ascribing these marks to some being capable of intentions (the living sea, the haunting Wordsworth, etc.), or you… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
10/23/07 |
120 |
10/30/07 |
| Cormac McCarthy: “God Is A Little Boy, And Also Trout” |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) I’ve just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which set everyone’s hair on fire. As an example of style, it works; the book is criss-crossed by references to ash and the aftermath of fire, and despite the single-mindedness of the landscape, and the microscopic focus on… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
10/16/07 |
25 |
12/20/09 |
| The University and the Specter of Horowitz |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) They say in Harlan County There are no neutrals there You’ll either be a union man Or a thug for J. H. Blair -Florence Reese (lyrics), “Which Side Are You On?” In an ongoing series of posts at Acephalous, Scott Kaufman has been linking to and… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
10/06/07 |
90 |
10/11/07 |
| I’m McLovin It: Sexuality in the Age of Advertising |
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes) The setting is a mojitos-and-burgers place in the Lower East Side: shaded, pricey, with outdoor seating and fresh guacamole. I’m there with two friends, two other women I’ve just met, and a guy who isn’t quite place-able: he may be on a date with one of… |
Joseph Kugelmass |
09/14/07 |
14 |
01/19/09 |
