johnm's blog

Submitted by johnm on May 28, 2009 - 11:12pm

When I’m not talking about heuristics, another of my scholarly interests is anxiety and popular culture. I recently wrote a paper on the popularity of the alternative history genre as a means of understanding broader cultural anxieties about identity (you can look for it in the program for NCA in the fall if you’re interested – I’ll be presenting a shortened version of it there). Sometimes people don’t know what I mean when I say “alternative history,” so let me just clarify that I don’t mean works like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

May 24, 1980

Submitted by johnm on May 24, 2009 - 9:07pm

For today, my favorite poem. Also, the title is my birthday (though methinks "1983" would be better for my own self-interested reasons). Anyone else notice how much of a poetry interest we Blogorites seem to have? It's uncanny.

May 24, 1980
by Joseph Brodsky

I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages,
carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters,
lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis,
dined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles.
From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly

Demystifying comprehensive exams

Submitted by johnm on May 12, 2009 - 8:17pm

Last Thursday was my comprehensive exam oral defense, and I'm glad to report that my defense was a success. On another note, today was our fellow blogger Adria Battaglia's dissertation prospectus defense (and also her birthday) and she passed as well, now officially becoming ABD :)

On missing the social

Submitted by johnm on May 6, 2009 - 2:32pm

I really enjoy reading anything written by Henri Lefebvre just for the attention he gives to making his criticism sound like poetry. I'm working my way through the first volume of his Critique of Everyday Life, and came across the following passage. I don't think I've ever read anything else that makes so clear our proclivity for missing the human hand's work in constructing our experiences of everyday life.

From the 2008 Verso edition of Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, chapter 2: "The Knowledge of Everyday Life," pp. 131-132.