A friend sent me the text of a recent WSJ editorial entitled “Will This Crisis Produce a ‘Gatsby’?� I’ll link to it later—for now I want to recreate my bad-faith reading experience in all its glory.  My first reaction was to the title, even though I know authors never write their own ti...

As a child I lulled myself to sleep by imagining myself into the fiction worlds I inhabited by day.  I was Ishmael and Frodo and I was Luke Skywalker and the Great American Hero.  I visualized myself to sleep through my teens.  Every night I strengthened my muscle's memory by ceaselessly starting...

As anyone who teaches funny books or films knows, the task of convincing students that the scene before them is anything other than incidental would try Job’s patience.  You show them a panel from the surprisingly awful Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator like, say, this and ask them to t...

So submits Roberto Bolaño, in the universally praised 2666, about scholars like me.  He falls prey here to the Robertson Davies' romance of academic life, in which even minor disagreements are elevated to shrieks against creed as red in claw as they are long in the tooth.  Scholars like m...

( x-posted .) On this day in 2008, Jim Beaver—a.k.a. Ellsworth—commented on my post about the language of Deadwood .  I know that’s not really historical, but damn it, it’s cool.  Now for something completely historical: On this day in 1929, Ursula K. Le Guin was born to Alfred and...

( x-posted.) Part 1: The “Argument� According to Jack Cashill—in an article first published at WorldNetDaily—Dreams from My Father was probably written by Bill Ayers. Cashill opens by demonstrating that Obama, unlike every undergraduate ever, published crap poems in a college literary journa...

To misquote Henry Kissinger: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue—that is why academic politics are so bitter." [1]  Academic politics, absolutely, but the same doesn't obtain in academic publications (at least not in...

Jonathan Gottschall proposes embracing the scientific method in literary theory. As ridiculous as that may sound, he makes an interesting case in talking about Roland Barthes’ assertion that the author is dead (meaning, all interpretation is subjective, therefore, no text can be presumed to ha...

Consider the following sentence from George Levine's Darwin Loves You : "Who," asks Max Weber, "who—aside from certain big children who are indeed found in the natural sciences—still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything ab...

It's not so fine.  Bad readings often resemble paranoid ravings because the critic draws specious connections between irrelevant topics.  Ninety-two percent of Pynchon criticism never escapes the paranoid orbit of his novels for a reason.  When you inform someone his analogy borders o...