Hugh Nicoll's Blog

An ignorant question leads Dr. King to offer a strong lesson in black history in two minutes flat. I can tell that he’s slightly irritated, but also determined to break it ALL the way down. Which he does brilliantly. A king. #MLK90 pic.twitter.com/YJvvv4X22N — Ava DuVernay (@ava) January 21, 2019

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Abandoned this blog in the fall of 2015, toward the end of my tenure as a professor of American studies and EFL classes for Japanese university students here in Miyazaki. Still in the game, though now as a part-time lecturer, & still in the struggle to teach and learn with my students, but as an […]

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This Saturday, 7 November 2015, I am giving a talk for members of our MMU alumnae association on “Liberal Arts and Lifelong Learning.”

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Next week the city of Liverpool hosts the IATEFL conference. If you cannot attend, but are interested in language learning and teaching, click on the banner below to access the video feeds from the conference.

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Giddy at midnight, still giddy at first light: the upgrade to Lion, Mac OS 10.7, was a rib-tickling kick from start to finish, and put a feather in the cap of an already very happy day, at least for those with geeky tendencies, for had already updated BBEdit and Tinderbox. I had also read a […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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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