Category Archives: public universities

Ilium, Iowa City: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five

Posted on October 23, 2013 by wcd2

October 23, 2013 For someone interested in the twentieth-century epic, Slaughterhouse Five is a no-brainer. How else would one call a story set in Ilium, talking about war, about death and the counterfactual? But did I ever stop to think about … Continue reading →

Posted in Boostores, Cities, Climate change, Contemporary novel, Environmentalism, epic, public universities, Science fiction, Twentieth century literature | Tagged Dresden firebombing, Floods 2013, Guggenheim Fellowship, Iliad, Ilium, Iowa City, John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, Prairie Lights Bookstore, Slaughterhouse-Five, World War II | Leave a comment

Shankar, Coltrane, Whitman: Within You, Without You

Posted on December 12, 2012 by wcd2

December 12, 2012 2012 is full of deaths at the year’s end. Dave Brubeck last week; this week, Ravi Shankar. Shankar was half an American musician (the fractions don’t have to add up to a zero-sum game). Since 1970 he … Continue reading →

Posted in Afro-Asian alliances, Asia, Cities, collaboration, Diaspora, Educational institutions, Ethnicity, Global South, India, jazz, Music, Nineteenth-century literature, Poetry, public universities | Tagged Beatles, California Institute for the Arts, Don Juan, Encinitas, Faust, George Harrison, Gounod, Jean-Pierre Rampal, John Coltrane, Mozart, Mtislav Rostropovich, Norwegian Woods, Philip Glass, Proud Music of the Storm, Ravi Shankar, Rossini, San Diego, Walt Whitman, William Tell | Leave a comment

All Saints Bookstore, Beijing

Posted on June 13, 2012 by wcd2

June 13, 2012 We were in Hong Kong on June 4, the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. A candlelight vigil had been held in Victoria Park for the past 23 years. This year, 180,000 people showed up. There … Continue reading →

Posted in Asia, Boostores, China, Cities, collaboration, Comparative literature, Contemporary novel, Diaspora, Dissidents, Educational institutions, literary magazaines, macro politics, Media, Nobel Prize, print medium, public universities, Publishers, Translation, Twentieth century literature, Universities, world literature | Tagged All Saints Bookstore, Beijing, Beloved, candlelight vigil, Cormac McCarthy, Ernest Hemingway, Hong Kong, Liu Suli, Liu Zaiobo, Mark Twain, Nobel Prize, Peking University, Richard Powers, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Steve Jobs, Strand, The Echo Maker, The Road, Thinkers Cafe, Tiananmen Square crackdown, Toni Morrison, Tsinghua University, Wansheng Bookstore, World Literature Institute, Zhao Baisheng, Zora Neale Hurston | 9 Comments

World, Globe, Planet: UCLA

Posted on February 29, 2012 by wcd2

February 29, 2012 I’ve always loved the big white buildings of Berkeley, but the brick buildings of UCLA (russet and ochre, so different from the plain red of the east coast) must be more habitable? Royce Hall, with its twin … Continue reading →

Posted in African-American literature, Afro-Asian alliances, collaboration, Comparative literature, Global South, globe, peripheral networks, planet, public universities, Twentieth century literature, world literature | Tagged Ahmed Sékou Touré, Bandung Conference, Berkeley, Cesar Vallerjo, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Richard Wright, Sino-African alliance, UCLA, W B Yeats | 42 Comments