Bad First Lines

The Phantom Professor: Night: Dark, stormy, etc.

Phantom Prof on the "Dark and Stormy Night" contest.

Tutor Trend

"if they can't handle the paperwork in first grade, heaven help them in the cutthroat bureaucracy of third"

Meghan Cox Gurdon at WSJ with an interesting series of reflections on  the emerging tutoring culture.  On one hand, I understand (and second) her concerns about over-achieving parents and the elevation of cutthroat status competition over educational issues.  On the other hand, I wonder if the tutoring culture, as it grows, will be a very welcome source of pedagogical innovation.

Appiah on Cosmopolitanism

RSA Journal - The Case for Contamination

An excerpt (it appears) from Kwame Anthony Appiah's book on cosmopolitanism (Cosmopolitanism) in which he articulates some of the problems inherent to disucssions about authentic and inauthentic identity in a postmodern (and postcolonial) world. What always interests me in discussions about cultures meeting and mixing is the tendency of local cultures, when importing outside practices, to make them in some sense their own--tweaking and twisting and adapting. (De Certeau called this sort of thing secondary production--a production done by those who are most often seen as just consumers, and an aty of everyday creativity.) Anyway: an interesting read.

SLOP LIT DUE DATE - LAST CALL

Fellow ETCers,

Slop Lit stories are due at midnight on Saturday, June 24. That's next Saturday for those of you without calendars, physical or digital, or for those of you who don't have access to the date and time for whatever other strange reason. This is the final due date before Mark and I start to put this thing together. We will accept no late submissions (unless you offer us a) money; b) pizza; c) a pizza bride; d) sex [preferably with (Swedish) women; e) all of the above) So if you have stories, poems, whatever, just send them to me at...

hisnameisdan(at)yahoo(dot)com

(If your stories are late you should send items a-b in the snail mail. You can't send Swedish women and pizza brides using electronic mail. Bah!)

That is all.

Love and Tenderness,
Dan

p.s. I have no idea why the font stayed huge. It just did. I think we should make all of our blog posts in the largest font possible and market the blog to old people.

We Await Silent Tristero's Empire

"There was an intermission.  Metzger lurched into the undersized lobby to smoke, Oedipa headed for the ladies' room.  She looked idly around for the symbol she'd seen the other night in The Scope, but all the walls, surprisingly, were blank.  She could not say why, exactly, but felt threatened by this absence of even the marginal try at communication latrines are known for."

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 69-70.