I’d like to begin by thanking Tyson Woolman for bringing up Raymond Carver in response to one of my recent videos. Today I found “Fever”, in a collection titled, American Short Story Masterpieces (Edited by Raymond Carver, himself, and Tom Jenks). I believe the story had initially appeared in a collection called, Cathedral, which I’m planning to read in full. “Fever” is a strange story. It doesn’t contain any dramatic event, any transformation of a…
Sometimes after recording a video I end up feeling I completely failed to say the most important parts of what I had planned. How could the very parts that motivated the video in the first place slip through my fingers? And how could I let that happen? Why didn’t I re-take the video? What I have in mind isn’t just about forgetting to say something, although that can also happen. But sometimes I say something…
What makes a place familiar? What makes a visit feel like a return? Part of the familiarity is knowing what I can or cannot do in a place—the rights and duties the place affords me. In the place I am now writing about, one of my rights is the right to pray. I have the right to pray despite my uncertainties and despite my faults. Perhaps I have the right and duty to preserve this…
I have been writing and re-writing this post for months. Something that makes writing it difficult is the multiplicity of conflicting starting points. There is no one way to start it. And the decision about how to start will affect what it becomes. I have decided to begin with writing about that multiplicity, the conflicting voices, and the competing destinations for this one piece of writing. Do I begin from a position of faith or…
During the year I spent in Leiden (2015-16) I did almost nothing that would count as academic productivity. In fact I cannot think of any other postdoctoral researcher, who I have met or have heard of, less productive than me during that year. It wasn’t that I didn’t have ideas. I had many ideas, enough to keep a team of 4-5 students busy. But I no longer identified with the ideas. The ideas were coming…