Hardly the Last Word

Well, it was a busy week in several ways.? As you’ve read here, I’ve been teaching like crazy, and beyond that, my Ubuntu 8.10 disk came in the mail, so I installed it on the new laptop, and I’ve never had a faster computer. Between the dropping cost of PC’s and the solid programming in [...]

Comp class yesterday was quite fun. ?We started out digging into the text of the Declaration of Independence, a document that, for good reasons and bad, has become a sort of canonical document in America, good for quoting and waving as a talisman but not often good for reading. ?My students immediately picked up on [...]

I’m not going to make the mistake this time of trying to switch mid-stream.? When this site meets my expectations, I’ll import Hardly the Last Word and make this my only blog.? Until then, the wordpress.com site will remain my blog.

The most interesting line of questioning from today’s lit survey class was one for which I had not prepared adequately.? (I recognize that such is the finitude of humanity, but I still often wish to have such days back.)? As we discussed the opening scenes of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, a couple students noted what [...]

I didn’t give my best lesson ever yesterday in comp, but it wasn’t bad either.
Our main texts for the day were excerpts from John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, and my initial plan was to use the question of children’s education to point up the radical differences between [...]

I’m looking at my notes for today’s lesson on the final two acts of King Lear in English Literature Survey course, and I believe that if I made a list of the six most interesting bits I wanted to get to, I’d have missed five of them.? I know we were there for seventy-five minutes, [...]

I think that the Heidegger podcast saved me from the grumpiness that I could hear over the lecture around me.
Yes, I’m listening to a Berkeley course on Heidegger’s Being and Time?as I read through it with Michial Farmer. ?It’s quite nice.
Anyway, as I listened to Hubert Dreyfus expound on the role of norms in the [...]

No Snickering–That Road Sign Means Something Else
This NYT article had me laughing out loud–being a sucker for the unintentional inappropriate joke, I was loving every minute of it.? The best part, though, was this map of the place-names.? Now there’s a map.
?Sniggering at double entendres is a loved and time-honored tradition in this country,? Carol [...]

On my brother’s advice, I went ahead and registered the domain http://www.nathangilmour.com a while ago, and in the intervening time I’ve been putting together a new professional page.? So take a gander if you will, and if you have suggestions for the banner, do give them–I’m no graphic designer, and this fourth iteration of the [...]

I’m once again in debt to Fran Teague, my wonderful dissertation director, for a bit of pedagogical gold.? When we took on King Lear in her graduate Shakespeare class in 2005, she introduced the history-of-theater question of how one could stage Cornwall’s and Regan’s brutal act of putting Gloucester’s eyes out on a thrust stage.? [...]

Yesterday’s class landed me in a strange place but one that, for the moment, I’m alright with.? As I’ve noted elsewhere, I don’t go out of my way to announce that I’m a Christian but also don’t duck the question when students ask.? (I do, after all, often make reference to the text of biblical [...]

Micah to Mary yesterday:
“Pretty soon I’m going to be a grownup, and then people will call ME Daddy.”

I realized while planning today’s lesson that, until some of the characters just go devilish on the audience, I have a hard time blaming anyone in King Lear for what comes to pass.? On one hand, Regan and Goneril don’t speak up when the old man insists on keeping a 100-man private army after ceding [...]

If there are any rich blog-patrons out there, I have good news for you.? The C BD academic calendar showed up in the mail this weekend, and I’m positively salivating over some of the offerings.? If you want to start a career as a wealthy blog patron, you could make my year by sending any [...]

Weatherman and Cockroach
This shouldn’t be nearly as funny as it is, but it is.

Immanuel Kant: “What Is Enlightenment?”
Thursday’s comp class (the brave souls trying out my Enlightenment special topics class) got into some pretty good discussions of this surprising text.? Kant sets out sounding like the very spirit of the age, calling on people to dare to understand, but the essay ends in surprisingly contradictory terms, or at [...]

I don’t know why, but it’s taken me a month to actually set eyes on the copy of my Milton chapters since I printed off the latest draft.? I’ve been working on other chapters, but I’ve been terrified of finding nothing worthwhile when I revisit the chapters on which I’ve worked hardest.
On Wednesday morning I [...]

We finished up The Country Wife today, and my classes agreed with me that the in vino veritas scene in act five seems forced.? The play as a whole, as I mentioned last time, is a nonstop flurry of dirty jokes, stratagems to get sex, and more dirty jokes.? The most central characters are the [...]

Philosophers at Work, and Hoping for it
I had to laugh a bit and commiserate with my compatriots over in the philosophy departments when I read this article.? I don’t have much to add to it, but this exchange with Jeremy Morris, a recent Ph.D, rang quite true:
Asked where he’d be willing to go to teach [...]

The two really don’t have much to do with one another, save that I taught both this morning.? Starting Thursday I’m likely going to start writing a post for each, but today, we mainly did interviews in my Enlightenment comp class, so there wasn’t much on the order of content save a brief lecture on [...]