Blogs

Bernard Madoff is a classic Mafia-style gangster. He comes from gangsters - his mother was a crook. Investigators are looking into his father-in-law. A lot of his friends and investors are crooks. ...

The poet W.D. Snodgrass has died. Here's a poem of his written in the spring but just as right for the beginning of the year. UD interrupts each stanza with a little interpretation. Go here for ...

With the new year, we tell ourselves the story of a year. The story of last year. The story of the year to come. The storyteller, Doris Lessing says in her Nobel speech, "will [always] be ...

Norman Maclean, an Aristotelian, learned deeply what Aristotle taught: tragic art is cathartic. Toward the end of his life, he wrote a small American tragedy, A River Runs Through It, and in writing ...

UD has stepped in the same river twice, and reread, after twenty years, Norman Maclean's story, A River Runs Through It. She hasn't seen the film again, but she remembers admiring it. Maclean was ...

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, and UD's gazing at twelve white roses in a twelve-cup teapot. That's her foreground. Her background is the Atlantic Ocean. She's on sabbatical from her ...

Start here: The more highly corporatized the university, the more corporate in their attitudes the faculty. Especially faculty imports from the corporate world -- people who aren't really ...

Universities are winsome, dappled, pathetic things. Their two main constituents, students and professors, are cute and idealistic. They worry about Darfur and solar power and whether we can be ...

Suicides, especially the suicides of sensitive writers we love (Virginia Woolf, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace), are a serious body blow. They anger and demoralize us. They make ...

I'm sitting on Leslie Whittington's bench. Born 1955. You can only follow one or two stories, and of course UD - a George Washington University professor who has spent research time in Australia ...