some good bits from the Schumacher’s follow-up to Dear Committee Members “… temporary instructors, who could probably earn more as forty-hours-a-week fast-food managers than they did as adjunct faculty …” p28-9 “The next student tried and failed to pronounce the word ‘tragic’. … At the back of the room … a student was dribbling hot …
Category: literature
Jun 18 2026
from I Don’t, Clementine Ford
There’s a lot here and every bit is worth reading. Better yet, just get the book. And read it. Every word. * from blurb for Ford’s I Don’t “why do so many women still believe that our value is intrinsically tied to being chosen by a man?” “Ford explains how capitalist patriarchal structures need …
Jun 07 2026
Patricia Pearson, Playing House
(I’ve discovered a new funny author…) “He worked as a jazz musician, living off the avails of his art, which was the annual salary equivalent of two Smarties and a piece of string.” p4 “…he understood certain expatriate secrets, such as where Alberta was and how it felt to be treated like a doofus in …
Apr 21 2026
some funny bits from Tim Dorsey’s The Maltese Iguana
“I don’t need to read anything to know what I’m talking about!” / “In one sentence you’ve just summed up everything wrong wtih our country today!” p152 “A few short years ago, we could look at a drinking glass and agree it was filled to the midpoint with water, then argue about what it meant. But today? …
Dec 09 2025
Death of an Author, by Aidan Marchine and Stephen Marche
For those of you who don’t know, Death of an Author is a novel co-written by the ‘self’-named AI Aidan Marchine (95%) and the human author Stephen Marche (whose The Next Civil War impressed me, leading me to take a look at Death.) I started reading the novel, but it didn’t grab my attention very …
Oct 08 2025
The Cockroach – Ian McEwan
Wickedly funny. British, but frighteningly international and, of course, the President of the U.S. had to be included …
Sep 22 2025
Academic Pursuits, Guy R. McPherson – a delightful/intelligent read/expose
“‘Fahrenheit 451 of the Vanities’ in which an eighties yuppie is denied books; he does not object, or even notice.” p5 “‘Night of the Living Dead Poets Society’: A mid-career professor in the humanities continuously re-lives the same poor performance in the classroom, as much to his own chagrin as that of his students.” p5 …
Sep 17 2025
The Thing Itself, Adam Roberts – a fascinating read
The Thing Itself, by Adam Roberts is a fascinating read. Especially section 5 of chapter 5 and chapter 9. I was sitting on my dockraft reading, needing to stop often, look up across the water, and just … think about what was just said. (It occurs to me that anyone seeing an old-ish woman sitting …
Sep 04 2025
from The Yearbook, Holly Bourne
“The group chat should essentially just have been titled ‘Adam breathed—applaud’.” p29 Was anyone else out there the invisible little sister? “The end of childhood — realizing adults don’t know what the hell they’re doing.” p55 “My future wasn’t something the family ever really discussed. I guess I was supposed to just figure that out …
Aug 04 2025
a few bits from John Scalzi’s Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded
(a collection of pieces from his “Whatever” website at https://whatever.scalzi.com/) “They don’t really advertise that they kill people,” said marine reservist Stephen Funk, about why he refused to report for active duty. “I didn’t really realize the full implications of what I was doing.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 4/2/03 responding to that, Scalzi says “You have to …
fiction
