Jan Mieszkowski
Professor of German & Comparative Literature at Reed College. Recently finished a book about the languages of botany.
- A friend has a student who constantly texts in class. Today she wrote to say that her phone is broken and she needs to miss class to get it repaired.
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- Bizarre. A few hours ago, I referenced this show for the first time in a decade. I cited it as evidence that I have actually seen some good tv. 😂
- A poem is a horde of destructions. –Wallace Stevens
- This is why you do the reading.
- Kant is never interested in the past; what interests him is the future of the species. –Hannah Arendt
- A masterpiece of literature is never anything more than a dictionary in disorder. –Jean Cocteau
- Cake en abyme.
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- I taught this about 10 years ago. I think it went over quite well, as I recall.
- Pleased to have a piece in this new volume.
- "He thought that he had learned patience, but he had only lost impatience." –Maurice Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion
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- Spent most of the day in an online symposium – 6 excellent papers and a cool roundtable discussion of texts by Hemingway and Hans Christian Andersen.
- What are students taught in high school such that they worry that the most basic exegetical move may constitute "overreading"?
[This user deactivated their account]- Exactly. I tell them: "Overreading? We aren't even close to getting out of the realm of underreading!"
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- (There's a newer version in Crises of the Sentence, but this should probably do.)
- Don’t you know that "No" is the wildest word we consign to Language? –Emily Dickinson
- I dwell in Possibility - A fairer House than Prose - More numerous of Windows - Superior - for Doors -
- Book Botany
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- I was going to try to guess what sort of software it might be, but then you gave it away.
- Sigh.
- Furcht vor der Nacht, Furcht vor der Nicht-Nacht -Franz Kafka, 18 Okt. 1917
- Recommended!
- It’s a genre?
- “Sound film as the limit for Kafka’s and Chaplin’s worlds.” –Walter Benjamin
- TFW you realize that the bookstore categories have passed you by.
- Required seminar wear.
- Reading between the lines.
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- Sure, I'd like to be added.
- Nice to see that someone got up early to poster campus.
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- Has anyone said L'Avventura?
- A review of The Virtual Sentence, eight writing exercises by Kyle Booten, D. Graham Burnett, Brian Dillon, Jeff Dolven, Jan Mieszkowski, Sally O’Reilly, Mónica de la Torre, and Elena Vogman.
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- One of my favorite spots anywhere.
- Google's default description of WB is great.
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- I saw that headline and just started laughing. Right on cue!
- Morning stroll.
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- Fresh peaches? Coffee milkshakes?
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- 😂
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- IFF (if and only if)
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- I guess I don't perceive clear trends in any particular direction, but of course, one tends to recall the strongest and weakest work, making it hard to know what is or isn't changing with the B students.
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- My view about college writing is that we have to unteach what they learn in AP English w/ its timed tests. Nevertheless, I think that today's 1st-year college student comes with more formal training in close reading than 10 or 15 years ago, albeit w/ little sense of what to do with such skills.
- Interesting. This is really not my experience. If anything, my students are better at constructing arguments today than they were 10 years ago, although one could certainly say that their essays are more prone to follow fixed patterns and hence are on balance less creative.
- "The quotations in my works are like robbers lying in ambush on the highway to attack the passerby and rob him of his conviction.” –Walter Benjamin "One should never trust what an author himself says about his work." –Walter Benjamin
- Schelling's inaugural lecture course in Berlin was attended by Friedrich Engels, Søren Kierkegaard, Mikhail Bakunin, Jacob Burckhardt and Leopold von Ranke. #respect
- There's insouciance and there's languid Lukács insouciance.
- Decisions, decisions...
- I was fantasizing about buying this property and turning it into a critical theory institute – residencies for all! Then I read that during The Great Coastal Gale of 2007 its roof was blown off and its occupants were trapped there for 20 hours as the winds gusted over 120 mph. Now I really want it!
