Henry Tilney Reads Gothic Lit

Some questions after rewatching You’ve Got Mail

I rewatched this recently, in the middle of a stint of making really terrible recommendations to my husband about what we should watch (the first was All of Me, in which Lily Tomlin and Steve Martin are set up to be hilariously comedic and then nothing particularly funny happens in the whole movie except for Steve Martin pretending to be both Lily Tomlin and himself at the same time, the…

Reflections on Jessica Jones, Season 3

I watched this show in fits and starts: about half of season one in a row, and then a months-long hiatus, and all of season 2 on trains around China.  I’m plowing through season 3 during the first real week of my summer break.

This show has its ups and downs, for sure.  I think my first break was inspired by Jessica’s unceasing hard-scrabble-ness, which got old after awhile, or maybe it was…

I watched Disney’s The Little Mermaid this afternoon, and I have some questions.

What, exactly, are we supposed to imagine is happening with her hair at any point in time? Did the artists have some kind of inspiration? It defies exactly as much gravity on land as it did in the sea.  I know, I know, Disney hair has already been covered many times. Is there a hair tutorial? There’s probably a hair…

The Friday before winter break, a student came into my classroom at lunch, just to chat.  It’d been a hard morning for him, so while I worked on something that didn’t need much attention, I let him talk as he paced back and forth from my desk to the door, and back again. The conversation (maybe monologue would be a better term) strayed from topic to topic but somehow, we ended up at men’s rights.…

I did not mean to start this thing and then let it lie for weeks at a time. I’ve had a hard time writing, in these last eighteen days.  I guess you could chalk it up to shock.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who opens up a word processing doc or a notebook and feels literally and metaphorically choked up. I’ve been focusing on the day-to-day; routine centers me and makes me feel like I’m doing…

The spectre of Hillary Clinton

This morning, I showed a ten-minute news overview to my senior government class.  In it was Hillary Clinton, at one of her most recent rallies.  It’s raining, and she’s yelling into the microphone in a voice that sounds like she’s been screaming for a year (which she basically has). It followed a clip of Donald Trump at a similar rally, during which all of my students were silent.  When Clinton…

That's who you call now, right, if you have an idea for the next Broadway musical sensation?

I recently rediscovered this obvious masterpiece, created out of desperation when, while studying abroad in Ireland my junior year of college, I was required to take a course comparing The Iliad to the Irish epic, the Tain bo Cuailnge.