Why I Chose Memphis: Dr. J
This post is a (bit delayed) response to fellow-blogger JLotz’s Quick Memphian Call to Arms, which she posted over on her (excellent) blog Waves and Wires. JLotz recently turned...
I posted my first blog post in 2006 on the first site domain I had ever purchased. I chose the name “ReadMoreWriteMoreThinkMoreBeMore” for two reasons: (a) it was the first on a list of rules that I gave to my students every semester and, (b) it seemed like an unwieldly and clunky-enough site name that no one would ever try to buy it.
I was wrong about that second part. After almost 15 years of blogging on that site, the domain name was bought out from under me in 2022. I did my level best to try to recover it (even buy it back!), but it was a heavily-trafficked site at that point and I had to eventually come to terms with the fact that this particular digital garden of ideas, that I had tended and nurtured for so long, and which I loved, now belonged to someone else.
It’s taken some time for me to get all of that content transferred to this site, but it’s here now. Because I know I have lost many of the internet’s links that traced back to it, I’ve been working a lot behind the scenes to redirect as much of the old traffic as I can to this new site. I’m alsoĀ trying to organize that archive to make it more easily searchable, but that’s slow and tedious work.
At any rate, it’s all here now., and I’ve “tagged” all of the old RMWMTMBM posts in a way that most closely approximates their original categorizations, so I hope you can find whatever you might be looking for using the tag cloud below.
This post is a (bit delayed) response to fellow-blogger JLotz’s Quick Memphian Call to Arms, which she posted over on her (excellent) blog Waves and Wires. JLotz recently turned...
Everyone knows that there are millions of hilarious YouTube videos out there, probably as many as there are YouTube videos featuring cute kids doing cute things. I don’t usually...
It shouldn’t come as any surpise that the “Red Wave” did, as predicted, wash ashore in Washington, DC after polls closed on the 2010 midterm elections last Tuesday. Although...
I’ve tried to refrain from commenting here upon the complete train-wreck that is (“surprise” Senate primary winner from Delaware) Christine O’Donnell, but a self-respecting political blogger can only be...
There are debates about a few really important issues that have a tendency after a while to fade into a kind of white noise for me. I generally find...
A strange confluence of events recently has led me to consider more seriously the question above: What is philosophy? One might think that this is a perennial question within...
[NOTE: This is a post that was originally published on this blog a year ago (10/08/09), which I am re-posting now because of recent interest in the newly-developed and...
I’ll admit that I hesitated, more than once– more than a dozen times, to be honest– before posting this entry. So, allow me a few caveats here at the...
This is one of the greatest things I’ve seen on the old interwebs in a long, long time. It’s a collaborative recording of “Stand By Me,” the familiar Ben...
I made a brief mention in my last uncanny valley post about the difference between “real” music, by which I mean music played on actual (i.e. “real,” material or...
Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve written several posts about the “uncanny valley” on this blog. The theory of the uncanny valley is loosely based...
The much-ballyhooed “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear”— brainchild of America’s Ironists-in-Chief Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert— came and went this past Saturday in Washington, DC. Although the crowd-count...
In the interview “On Philosophy” in Negotiations (Columbia University Press, 1995, p.136), Deleuze remarks: Philosophy is always a matter of inventing concepts. I’ve never been worried about going beyond...
If you didn’t “early vote” before, please take the time to go to your local polling place today and exercise your franchise. As Tom Stoppard once wrote: “It’s not...
I’m guessing that many of us have those fleeting fantasies from time to time in which we conjure up what we imagine would be the AWESOMEST. COURSE. EVER. For...
In the Humanities, we like to emphasize the importance of what we call “close reading,” by which we mean concentrated attention to the details of a text: syntax, specialized...
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.”...
Sometime in the last couple of days, when I wasn’t paying attention, this blog passed the 60,000 hits mark. Thanks y’all.
Dr. Miller, aka Anotherpanacea, has called me to account for my post a few days ago (“Why I Won’t Turn It In“), in which I detailed my objections to...
Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen’s new book The Casualty Gap: The Causes and Consequences of America’s Wartime Inequalities (reviewed in The Nation here) proves that the age-old description of...
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...
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...
I’m not ashamed to admit that philosophers can be quite persnickety in our insistence upon precision in language. Much of what we do, after all, involves precisely defining things,...
Somebody, for the love of God, please make it stop. Once again, the New York Times has given us embarrasingly reductive, bordering on cartoonish and condescending, reportage about Memphis...
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...
One advantage of sabbatical life (a.k.a. the solitary writing life) is that you get all the music-listenin’ time you could ever want or stand. Assuming you’re one of those...
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...
From his essay “Racism and Culture” in Toward the African Revolution (Grove Press, 1964, p.59-60), Frantz Fanon writes: It is at this level that racism is treated as a...
Nassar al-Alwaki, father of alleged terrorist and Al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Alwaki, is suing the U.S. government for putting his American-born son on the military’s so-called “capture or kill” list....
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...
As everyone knows, there has been much Sturm und Drang about the proposed Park 51 project (a.k.a., the “Ground Zero mosque”) and its proximity to the lower Manhattan site...
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...
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...
“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...
From his most recent novel, Diary of a Bad Year (Viking, 2007, p.3), J.M. Coetzee’s chief narrator, SeƱor C, speculates: Every account of the origins of the state starts...
Earlier this week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued its second arrest warrant for the President of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on...
From The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt/HBJ, 1979, p. 295-6), Hannah Arendt tracks the coincidence of statelessness and rightlessness: The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived...
As many of you know, I was a tad bit obsessed with a certain theory in robotics known as “the uncanny valley” several months back. I even delivered a...
In State of Exception (University of Chicago Press, 2003, p.86-7), Giorgio Agamben writes:The aim of this investigation– in the urgency of the state of exception “in which we live”–...
In case any of you were still operating under the illusion that our prisons at home are somehow better than our secret prisons abroad, Lousiana has stepped in to...
From “The University Without Conditions” in Without Alibi (Stanford University Press, 2002, p.231), Jacques Derrida describes “the Humanities of tomorrow”: These new Humanities would treat the history of man,...
I just returned from a long weekend in New Orleans, the second-greatest city in the U.S. South. One of my chief aims while in NOLA was to see Kermit...
The Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization, Physicians for Human Rights, has just released a White Paper entitled “Experiments in Torture” that documents medical professionals’ complicity with CIA human intelligence collection...
About a week ago, in a NYT article entitled “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” professor and provocateur Stanley Fish lambasted the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Texas Governor...
As I’m still not quite over my post-New-Orleans euphoric haze, I wanted to post one more thing about that city and its blessed horns before returning to more serious...
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...
Read no further if you’re not willing to consider the possibility that “anti-Israeli state policy” claims are NOT tantamount to “anti-Semitism.” The recent deadly attack on an aid-bearing flotilla...
This morning, in stereotypical egghead fashion, I tuned my radio to the Saturday NPR programming, poured myself a cup of coffee, and sat down to read the most recent...
The New York Times ran a story earlier this week entitled “The New Poor: Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Gains,” which painted a very grim picture of the...
Why I Chose Memphis: Liz Dagget
So, no sooner did I send out the request for readers to submit their own “Why I Chose Memphis” accounts than the responses started pouring in. Here’s the first...