Okay, so how many of us who are not professionally committed have read all of The Story of the Stone (I refer to the five volumes in David Hawkes and John Minford's translation, published by Penguin)? If you read Chinese, you probably read it all long ago, but I'm surveying the English-speakers today. I have an issue of conscience about this book. I hate to teach snippets, and in this case, the overall architecture of the 120-chapter version ...

The social sciences, when they get quantitative, often seem to be taking the long way round to express a perfectly obvious observation with percentages and verbiage—“A stitch in time shown to save 8.7 stitches,” and the like. Or such was my first take on reading this piece about emotional contagion: of course, if you’re always in the company of a complaining, negative, passive person, you will begin to feel that life is tiresome and you probab...

I just received from the university counsel, almost a year after the events, a copy of an anonymous denunciation of me sent to my dean by some cowardly scumbag writing on behalf of “Concerned Graduate Students” from the e-mail address “jazzsmith55@yahoo.com.” Alluding darkly to “what happened to one of our graduate student friends” (unnamed, of course), the letter informed the dean that “you should know that Professor Saussy sleeps with his s...

I had misgivings about the topic I had in mind for Thursday's post. That, and a day spent in the car (this is the modern style of parenting), made for no post. Misgivings, because I didn't want to scold. It was going to be about a situation I think every teacher these days, except perhaps our colleagues who teach in prisons, faces. The spectacle, that is, of a room of students who are allegedly taking notes but are obviously smiling to themsel...

My well is dry this week. I'd been mulling over what I could write about, but no topic coalesced. I read the news but nothing elicits a strong enough reaction for me to put thought to paper, as it were. My main preoccupation these days is the new course I'm teaching with new students at a new school, or more precisely, a new kind of institution from the ones I've known up to now.

I remember the moment I decided to learn Chinese. I was three thousand feet above the surface of the earth, flying back from a visit to my in-laws. I felt rested after a week away from the office and relieved to be heading back home. In Greek myth Atlas drew strength from having his feet on the ground but I seemed to be gaining power the higher we flew. I felt as if I were standing high above the slipstream of time, looking down upon all t...

Here are excerpts from a talk I gave to the language faculty at Harvard yesterday. --------- Good old Laozi, or whoever wrote the Daode jing, said in a few words just about everything there is to say about professional specialization. “A house is made of walls,” he said, “but it’s the gap in the wall, the door, that makes it usable.” A house without doors would, indeed, be an uncomfortable place to spend one’s career. But the condition of havi...

The last week of classes—time of regrets and relief. I tried to steer my last session toward a gentle landing, but there’s always a bit of a bump as it’s suddenly over. Now I can no longer say “… which we’ll make sure to talk about later” or “Good point, can we hold that for a while?” As usual, I ended the class thinking that I’d talked too much (it gets easier as the years go on—much easier, in fact, than listening) and that I’d left things ...

I just finished teaching Barthes' Mythologies along with a couple of other tasty examples of what we might, granting a little anachronism, call “cultural studies.” On Friday, my students and I spent class working through Barthes' “Operation Margarine” and Zizek's “A Cup of Decaf Reality.” We spent the last half of class discussing Zizek's borrowed question “Is having sex with a condom not like taking...

I was talking about Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis to a bunch of smart young Comp Lit graduate students this morning. My copy of Mimesis is embarrassingly old: bought used in Nashville, circa 1975, it was probably printed around ten years earlier than that. Attention collectors: it has the green geometric border and the tan details on matte paper, in the smaller trade paperback size. My students had bought the current edition, a good bit taller, wid...

It's the end of the fourth week of classes—the time in the semester when I am consumed by my job of teaching and administration, when events and obligations converge to choke off the last remaining pockets of free time or respite.

I was recently asked to give the commencement address at the graduation ceremony for the UCLA International Institute, a request which though it may have been designed to honor me filled me in every way with a kind of stupefying terror. I spent the week before the address (which happened Saturday) mostly thinking about nothing else, even while asleep, unfortunately. Despite my anxiety, it all went well.

I often read The Skeptical Inquirer, the publication of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. I have even assigned pieces from the journal/magazine to my students. I find the articles useful as exaggerated (a term which I do not use critically here) examples for evaluating arguments. Though I have a soft spot for the pseudosciences, I like that the Skeptical Inquirer does not limit itself strictly to eva...

Installing a dishwasher is, ideally, a pretty simple operation. Water has to go in, water has to drain out, and it needs electricity to make the whole thing go. Search online for help on this project and the message you’ll get is something like this: It’s easy. Do it yourself.

Among the basic economics terms I recall from an education on the subject that now seems sadly distant is the difference between a “flow” and a “stock.” The difference is pretty much what the terms suggest – a flow is something like income over time while a stock is a measure of stable wealth: the balance of a savings account, say. Or to use the standard metaphor, a flow is the water running out of the faucet into the bathtub, while a stock ...

In the last few weeks of classes, especially during Spring semester when the weather lightens everyone's mood, my students and I are looser in class and the discussion often digresses into things completely unrelated to the task at hand. The other day, after several such digressive moves away from the exercise I had set them to do, my students started asking me about where I'd gone to college. I don't make it a habit of divulging personal inf...

This weekend I happened to be at a colloquium at a very fancy university up the road from LA. In the middle of a conversation with a couple faculty members there, I mentioned that I wasn't looking forward to getting back home, as I had fifty papers to grade by Wednesday and I had yet to start. Both faculty members expressed astonishment: “What are you doing grading fifty papers?” one of them asked. “Don't you have a grader?&#...

As you may well know, Slate magazine has been running a series of articles for its “College Week.” Academics have weighed in on the state of higher education and the dangers of academic blogs, students have issued reports from the so-called “co-ed trenches,” writers have dredged up titles in response to the query “what's the most influential book you read in college?” And then there’s “The Hottest Professor on Campus: What Happens When Studen...

As part of my administrative duties, I am visiting the classes of new faculty in our program. For the graduate student lecturers who are only with us for the year, it’s part of their “faculty development” and mentoring so that they’ll become better teachers wherever they’re headed next. For our full-time faculty, in addition to faculty development, the class visit is one element among many in evaluating performanc...

I pulled an all-nighter to write my first college English paper, on an electric typewriter. The paper was on Beowulf and I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. I got a disappointing B on it. But it wasn’t just a B. It arrived with the phantom of another grade; for my professor had blotted out the + or – next to the B with such thoroughness that no amount of holding the paper up to the light could determine whether she had demo...

My students and I talk a lot about "ideology" lately. They are writing research papers in which they are required to come up with a conspiracy theory (or simply a reading of a thing or event against the mainstream accepted narrative). I asked them for suggestions of a film we might watch later in the term. Overwhelmingly, I got requests for--you guessed it--Conspiracy Theory, starring Mel Gibson. A close second was everybody's favorite ideolog...

This term I'm teaching an English course on Science. It seems a little odd, and it appeared that way to my students at first, but I’ve found that the science world provides just as much room for discussions of ethics and subjectivity, supplies a way to talk about the individual and the writer, even the passive voice and thesis statements, as any more humanities-focused topic. An analytic approach to science invites the critical thinking ...

I wanted to respond, in part, to Leif Fearn's comment on K. Klingensmith's "The First Days of School." I'm not sure if Fearn is responding to K. Klingensmith's piece, my comment, or both, but I will answer in a sort of excess: taking up Fearn's thoughts (that writing reveals the student, or the writer, or the voice) but also tackling a more general problem that I have encountered (and here, possibly unfairly, am making into one animal) in gett...

<%image(20050802-Mona-Lisa-Smile.jpg|285|425|Mona Lisa Smile poster)%> I&rsquo;m a little embarrassed to admit that I rented and watched &ldquo;Mona Lisa Smile,&rdquo; the Julia Roberts vehicle about a forward-thinking art history teacher from Berkeley who comes to teach at Wellesley, a very conservative and tradition-bound institution in 1953, we are told. I knew when I put it on my Netflix list that it had gotten mediocre reviews (a miserab...

Though I&rsquo;m making slow and steady progress, I haven&rsquo;t finished the de Kooning biography, so the follow-up to last week&rsquo;s entry will have to wait. This week, two recent headlines that caught my eye: &ldquo;Poor writing costs taxpayers millions&rdquo; and &ldquo;Students Say High Schools Let Them Down.&rdquo; The first one, an AP article appearing in Businessweek a few weeks ago, came to my attention through the weekly NCTE (...