Pop Culture/Film/Literature

The Secret Little Book-Banner Inside You (and Me)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 11 Comments

This week is Banned Books Week, so designated by the American Library Association, which created the week in the hopes of motivating us to celebrate our “freedom to read.” The ALA keeps a list of the most frequently challenged books each year, including a list of banned “classics,” and my guess is that a quick…

Why I Won’t Turn It In

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 4 Comments

I recently learned that my institution has signed up for Turnitin.com, an Internet “plagiarism-prevention” service that allows professors to submit students’ papers and checks them against other submissions to verify that they’ve not been copied. There’s no mandate at my institution yet (as far as I know) for faculty to participate, and so I plan…

Let The Right One In

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 2 Comments

If you’ve been stuck under a rock for the last couple of years, you may not be aware that vampires are all the rage right now. Since I’m not a huge fan of scary movies, scary monsters, or scary things in general, I’ve managed to sidestep any real exposure to the recent vampiremania, though a…

Solicitation

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 3 Comments

Just today, I posted a solicitation for book recommendations as my Facebook status. I asked for fiction recs– proscribing Stieg Larsson in advance — and almost immediately received a host of literary endorsements from my many bibliophile friends (and, a pleasant surprise, from my students as well). I was happy to see that most of…

Briefly Noted

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 0 Comments

I’m working against some fast-approaching deadlines– also working in the midst of some please-ice-me-down-or-shoot-me-now heat indices here in Memphis– so all I can rustle up are a few truncated reflections on things that have piqued my interest of late. For those of you playing along at home, I’ve provided helpful and handy-dandy guides for filing…

Deny and Imply

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 4 Comments

Gary Shteyngart’s new novel Super Sad True Love Story takes place in a not-too-distant future America that reads uncomfortably familiar and, consequently, entirely believable. There, America has suffered a sharp decline in global economic and political importance, and has refashioned itself as an almost unabashedly consumerist Security State– though the Horatio-Alger-esque resolve (and hubris) that…

3-Minute Fiction (Round 5)

June 9, 2024 Dr. J 1 Comment

Just a reminder that the 5th round of NPR’s excellent writing contest for listeners, Three Minute Fiction, is currently underway. This round is hosted by Michael Cunningham (author of A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, Specimen Days and, perhaps most famously, The Hours) who will serve as one of the…

Thinking In Images

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 3 Comments

I was at a dinner party recently with colleagues and, per usual, the conversation at some point turned to bemoaning students’ sometimes less-than-ideal language skills. The complaints were standard fare– what ever happened to proper grammar? to sophisticated and orderly essay construction? to close and careful reading skills? to the capacity for clearly translating ideas…

Inception

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 6 Comments

“What’s the most resilient parasite? An idea.” — Dominic Cobb, protagonist in Inception If you buy the basic premise of the new film Inception, most of our ideas (perhaps all of them) begin deeply in our subconscious, in our dreams. There, they are born and grow, fertilized and fed in a world in which they…

Thanks x 50K

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson 0 Comments

We’ve reached another milestone here at Dr J’s blog: 50,000 hits! We passed 10,000 hits back in our second year, and so it’s exciting to reach the 50K mark at just under four years! Here’s a big THANK YOU to all the readers who keep coming back to this small little speck in the blogosphere….

The Secret Little Book-Banner Inside You (and Me)

Why I Won’t Turn It In

Let The Right One In

Solicitation

Briefly Noted

Deny and Imply

3-Minute Fiction (Round 5)

Thinking In Images

Inception

Thanks x 50K

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