Hooked Through the Eye

I feel like a musky with all the fight gone out of him.»Jackson, Gordon. “Billy’s Girl.” Robert Shapard Ed. Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories. 1st ed. Salt Lake City: G.M. Smith, 1986: 180.« Last night I told one of...

Posted by mistersquid on February 24, 2010 7:38 AM

The Decline of the English Department

Early in his analysis of The Decline of the English Department, William Chace asserts that what is at the root of the decline is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books...

Posted by mistersquid on October 10, 2009 11:57 AM

Some Thoughts Regarding the Creation of Text-to-Speech Audiobooks Using Consumer-Grade Software, or One Possible Outcome for Academic Professionalism as a Result of Fully Digitzed Text

Codex Books, Audiobooks, and Assistive Devices: A Tale of Near Misses The last book I checked out of Alden Library while still a faculty at Ohio University was Clay Shirky’s 2008 Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without...

Posted by mistersquid on September 17, 2009 9:47 PM

Reorganizing This Movable Type Blog: Mistersquid Refreshed

Before returning to California after a 17-year adventure in the world of higher education (one that may not quite be done done), I restructured the way I was developing material for this blog. That restructuring was born of a...

Posted by mistersquid on September 13, 2009 12:48 PM

Boycott Thomson Research

My work currently depends upon Thomson Research’s EndNote. However, because Thomson is currently in the process of suing George Mason University for developing open-source Zotero, I will begin the process of looking for a replacement for EndNote. I recommend all...

Posted by mistersquid on September 27, 2008 8:50 PM

Dynamic Anchors using Javascript and Tinderbox

This entry is a very brief introdcution to one of the ways in which I use Tinderbox to enhance my teaching. Tinderbox is an unusual program in that it provides so a high degree of flexibility that at first...

Posted by mistersquid on September 22, 2008 1:48 PM

Writer

This morning, I finished reading "Those Who Write, Teach” by David Gessner, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, who discusses the effect of academic teaching (Creative Writing) on writers. In addition to being an excellent read,...

Posted by mistersquid on September 20, 2008 12:16 PM

Resurface

The two areas which have absorbed my attentions for the last two months (outside the shambles that passes for my personal life) has been my teaching and my writing. This entry is about the writing part of my life, research...

Posted by mistersquid on May 10, 2008 10:09 PM

Scripting Tag Clouds in MovableType

At the moment, I’m in the middle of proctoring the final examination for my afternoon American Literature survey (1918-present). Teaching a month into what is every other universities’ summer “breaks” (more accurately read “frenzied research period”) is one of the...

Posted by mistersquid on June 8, 2007 3:38 PM

Alas, Poor Horatio

Keeping the tradition of irritating my colleagues for their (and my) outmoded love of literature (and apropos of my somewhat insensitive interruption of  one of my colleague’s  accessing non-print media yesterday), I would like you to consider  an article...

Posted by mistersquid on March 23, 2006 12:00 AM

OU all over

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the profession I’ve found myself in, this whole literary critical/cultural studies schtick I’ve signed up for. It’s hard to believe that I knew I wanted to be a professor when I...

Posted by mistersquid on January 12, 2005 12:00 AM