Motoko Rich of the New York Times asks, “Are Book Reviewers Out of Print?” Our friends Dan Wickett, Maud Newton, Edward Champion, and Mark Sarvas, among others, answer. To my knowledge, none actually blogs from a basement in Terre Haute, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
English professors, hide your syllabi. Phyllis Schlafly would like to link the murders at Virginia Tech by Cho Seung-Hui to the college’s English classes: “A look at the websites of Virginia Tech’s English Department and of its professors reveals their mindset. We don’t yet know which courses Cho took, but it could have been any of these. Did he take Professor Bernice L. Hausman’s English 5454 called ‘Studies in Theory: Representing Female Bodies’?…Perhaps Cho took Professor Bernice Hausman’s English 3354 on ‘Fundamentals’ for which the syllabus promises an understanding of ‘deconstruction’ (a favorite word in English departments)…Did Cho get evil egotistical notions from Professor Shoshana Milgram Knapp’s senior seminar called ‘The Self-Justifying Criminal in Literature’?” Schlafly doesn’t know which, if any, of these courses Cho actually took, but she is certain that English departments are “often the weirdest and/or the most leftwing,” leading one to logically conclude that college English classes across the country are inspiring mass murderers. Sigh. And I thought it was video games.