Maybe Peanuts is the answer for me?

Check out the eggplant parmesan grinders from the Stork’s Nest. And the red or green chicken curry from Viet-Thai, or the panang curry from Cozy Thai! And don’t forget, the spam from the Diner can’t be beat.

I found something on the Colson Whitehead event for you, btw: a blog post from my colleague Aldon Lynn Nielsen, which doesn’t reproduce my remarks or Whitehead’s but does prove once and for all that my ginormous looming ghostly head is three times the size of Charlie Harris’s.

yeah, I’m at two.

And can you get the eggs, bacon and spam without the spam?

Well, it’s not really as hard as it looks, Zach, and despite what Fred says in comment 26b, I’m bettin’ that most of these books will still compel our attention in another 25 years. Kincaid, Auster, DeLillo, Morrison, Roth, and Powers have already established themselves as major figures, and their imaginative range and power is such that even their second-tier work is of interest. (Though I think Underworld is the best among the seven DeLillos I’ve read, and The Echo Maker among the two best of the five Powerses.) Whitehead and Lee are exceptionally promising youngsters, and you know, on some level you just can’t argue with a MacArthur and a PEN-Faulkner Award. I also happen to think that The Intuitionist and Native Speaker are exceptionally vivid and well-realized novels. Franzen . . . ah, well, Franzen is material for a whole nother post. I’ve turned on The Corrections for reasons that have nothing to do with the Great Oprah Debacle, though I still admire the writing in places. And Cris Mazza is an alt.press kinda-experimentalist whose work I’ve enjoyed for about a decade or so, but never taught.

Please consider dropping Roth’s “Plot Against America”.

Mitchell, I taught American Pastoral last year and think it’s vastly superior to The Plot Against America. But you should know that I did my due diligence and compared-and-contrasted Roth’s version of alternate history with a book called A Disturbance of Fate, which I described to both classes in some detail. Also I brought in the Simpsons’ version of “A Sound of Thunder” (from the Treehouse of Horror #8), and that was fun.

But it was worth teaching this one time. As with Lindbergh’s presidency, no lasting damage was done. But Kingsolver, yes. And I’m surprised no one’s nominated Cormac McCarthy.

So, I teach it badly once, and the next time I do well.

RM, that’s exactly what my dissertation director, Michael Levenson, told me as I packed the U-Haul for Illinois 18 years ago: you never get it right the first time, so don’t worry about that part. It’s like the first pancake: it’s always a little bit off. So I apologize to my students for burning them on one side, and ask (on the course evaluations) for all the suggestions they can make for the benefit of Students Yet to Come.

the parts of What’s Liberal in which you described your pedagogical techniques were by far my favorite

Thanks, Colin. This made my day. Not least because I’d never tried to write an extended narrative about what a course is like.

Speaking as a PSU grad-where on Earth do you go out out/order from every night? There aren’t all that many dining options in Centre County.

There are three, FS. Of course, it helps that we really love spam. Spam and bacon, spam and eggs, eggs, bacon and spam. . . .

I usually teach a course in ‘comparative world religions’ (Phil. Dept.; Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and this semester I was asked to fill in for a long-time friend who teaches a course in ‘political thinking ’ (Pol. Sci. Dept.; he left for a semester for our college’s study abroad program) which is a course that amounts to a survey of Western political thought: Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx…., as well as key political ideas: political obligation, natural law, social contract, etc. I thought I was more or less prepared but found I really needed to read all of these philosophers over again, and very carefully at that, as well as look at some secondary material (e.g., I enjoyed reading what Rawls had to say about Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau). In short, I was swamped, with absolutely no meaningful free time and very little sleep. Of course the second time around would be much easier, having now done the bulk of the course preparation (but as the class is outside my home dept. it’s unlikely I’ll be teaching it again). I think I worked for less than a dollar per hour this semester, so I suppose the money has very little to do with it! Lectures on Marx next week and reading papers for both of my classes at present so I better get back to work. [I’m an adjunct instructor at our college and work outside academica as well. And I did find the time to complete some small pieces for publication by way of keeping my sanity.]

Whenever he heard a scientist say that, he would hand the scientist the first volume of the SUMMA THEOLOGICA and say, “Let me know when you’ve finished that, we’ll discuss it and then you can start on the next volume.”

He claimed it worked quite well to make his point.