Hugh Nicoll’s Weblog

I have just finished reading Steve Rothman’s account of the publication of Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” which I also finished reading today. I have two copies of Hersey’s text in my library, the version published in the 1988 reprint of Here to Stay, a collection of Hersey pieces originally published in The New Yorker and in Life, [...]

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Two pieces on Dead Certain. Read ‘em ‘n’ weep . . . .
Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times.
Ed Pilkington in The Guardian.

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In the spring of 1969 when I was about to graduate from high school, Dr. King had been gone for a year, black power was in its ascendency (and in the FBI’s sights as we would learn all too well in December of that year. To remember it as a time of many troubles sounds/feels [...]

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“Seeds of Change,” a Grace Lee Boggs piece on the Bill Moyers Journal site asks a host of What must be done? questions for our time. She quotes Margaret Wheatley on the necessity of cultivating a new way of thinking about how we should participate in our troubled societies:
“From a Newtonian perspective, our efforts [...]

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The front page of yesterday’s Guardian featured a story, The Boardroom Bonanza on the 98 to 1 gap between executive and employee pay. I have no doubt that mention of the “R” word would carry little weight in policy discussions, but I also wonder what it will take for the people at the top to [...]

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Our first semester exams finished 1 August, but I was busy with marking, reading through student portfolios, writing up reports, committee work, etc. through 17 August. I failed, yet again, to make much progress cleaning my office, but I left Miyazaki on Monday the twentieth, and am now enjoying a working holiday. I have research [...]

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My sister Jessica and her partner Barry Oreck are performing at the Boulder Fringe Festival. They’ve got three more shows this coming weekend, Friday - Sunday. For more info, check out their page on the festival site.

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Yet another reason to be grateful for Pierre Joris’s return to more active blogging. Inspired by Pierre’s account of Dagtekin’s reading in Paris, I googled the poet, was was pleased to find his page at the French publisher site, Le Printemps des Poetes. I have no French, but very much enjoyed the excerpt from LE [...]

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Over at the TPM Cafe, Ari Berman discusses the ties between big capital and politics-as-usual, a response to notices of his recent piece in The Nation, “Hilary, Inc.” Nails it.

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James Wood has a delicious review of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in The New Republic. Here’s his in-a-nutshell description of dirty realism:

This was a prose of short declarative sentences, in which verbs docked quickly at their objects, adjectives and adverbs were turned away, parentheses and sub-clauses were shunned. An anti- sentimentality, learned mainly from Hemingway, [...]

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Digging, sorting, scrounging around in search of strategies for articulating a poetics/theory of/for autonomous learning and teaching found Joan Retallack’s contribution to Jacket 32, “What is Experimental Poetry & Why Do We Need It?”
Consider this description of being in responsive flow:

The chaotic interconnectedness of all things, the dynamic pattern-bounded indeterminacy in which we find ourselves, [...]

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Ron Silliman included a link to a Barbara K. Fischer review of Poetry and Pedagogy, edited by Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr, the other day. Haven’t read the collection of essays yet, but it’s clearly a must as I’ve been slowly plowing the same fields, inspired by the same notions suggested here the last couple [...]

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Geof Huth has published “A reading test” on his Visualizing Poetics blog. logo-like glyph…. he’s requesting comments, which he’ll then summarize and evaluate when he explains the text in a few days.
Don’t reckon I’ve many readers as this blog space has been mostly dark for the last thirteen months, but having had the past [...]

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Today Joe Tomei & Rick Lavin are giving a talk today at KouritsuDai on using Blogger in writing classes. I wonder what the advantages of Blogger might be over using other blogging engines or even a dedicated server.

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more on poetics and music in open forms from Barrett Watten, the text of the talk Watten gave at the symposium two weeks ago.
Braxton in the air, though still underground. Check out the 2001 interview with Fred Jung from Jazz Weekly. Good comprehensive intro on the Wikipedia Braxton page.

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There’s a male blackbird in a juniper perhaps 8 meters from my B&B window here in Harrogate. I can’t ever remember hearing the common blackbird sing before. Perhaps that’s because other than last spring’s visit to Cardiff, my only real stays in the UK have been too short, or in the winter. Have a listen, [...]

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Doc Searls has a really interesting piece on “The Intention Economy” up on the Linux Journal site. It’s a good, old-fashioned common sense critique of the marketing jargon that’s got most of us trapped in mind-rotting rhetorical fantasy lands. Bad for the soul, bad for the earth, and ultimately bad for business. Hoo hah!

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The unsurprising but no less tawdry evidence of the a lack of good faith in democracy by Bush and Blair, reported in the New York Times March 27, is given historical context by “The Founders Never Imagined a Bush Administration.” Thanks to Josh Marshall for the link.

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Followed a link from ReadySteadyBook to an essay on Nancy Armstrong’s How Novels Think by Miriam Burstein. Ms. Burstein’s study of the history of the novel, specifically in relation to identity, consciousness, and literacy, resonates in a thousand directions and can serve as a touchstone for at least hundreds of potential studies encompassing the teaching [...]

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Not that I’m feeling glum, but 2005 was a very exhausting year, so I’m hoping I can increase the intelligence of my game plan and do better in the coming twelve months. I’ve been enjoying, with the exception of a rather sore back, some extreme New Year’s cleaning, helping my youngest daughter move into what [...]

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