Notes from the MLA
Under the cascading sunshine in LA, amidst job interviewers in their Sunday best, the slovenly postures of their professors, and the complaints of waiters that teachers are the worst tippers, there was a sense of common purpose in the MLA: the teaching of literature and its role in our lives.
Neuro Lit and Crit
At the risk of self-contradiction, I want to draw attention to a recent "Room for Debate" in the New York Times. Gathering together a number of critics, including Stanford's very own Blakey Vermeule, the Times asks: 
Virtues one might not expect to find at an avant-garde(ish) music festival in the American South

Apologies for being somewhat slack on the blogging front these last few weeks. Exciting activities among the family of musicians I've been working with the past few years have kept me away from computers more than usual. I spent much of the last week hanging out in the American South -- a part of the country I rarely get to see -- on the occasion of Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee.