And our lounge today

Every president should commence a term in office with poetry. The arts are too often separated from government, and for no good reason. Only two presidents have invited poets to read from their work during inauguration: John. F. Kennedy (Robert Frost) and Bill Clinton (Maya Angelou, Miller Williams). Good news: Barack Obama has likewise named…

CANCELLATION The talk by poet and critic Adam Kirsch has been cancelled for this evening because of the weather. The talk was to have been in the Marvin Center Auditorium at 7 pm. We hope to reschedule him later in the semester; look to this blog for more information. Share on FacebookTweet

I believe I was born to blog (is this a good thing or should I have higher life aspirations?), but as much as I love this job I must acknowledge that there were many amazing English bloggers before me. Rajiv Menon was one of them, and if his post-blog future is any indicator, I should…

RateMyProfessors can be a delicate subject for faculty members, who often mistrust and fear it the way business owners mistrust and fear Yelp! (“The food was awesome!” “The food was inedible!” “Awesome!” “Inedible!”). But according to an interesting piece in The Hatchet, the site ranking system seems to produce results that roughly mesh with evaluations…

Last December, the English Department gave out 200 copies of Kalooki Nights, the challenging, sprawling, inspired, and ambitious 2006 novel by English writer Howard Jacobson, this year’s British Council UK Writer in Residence. Jacobson is a novelist, broadcaster, and journalist; London’s Independent, which publishes his weekly column, calls him an “acerbic cultural critic … known…

Congratulations to Tom Mallon for the excellent review of Yours Ever: People and their Letters in the New York Times Review of Books. An excerpt: It is next to impossible to read these pages without mourning the whole apparatus of distance, without experiencing a deep and plangent longing for the airmail envelope, the sweetest shade…