Category Archives: public universities

Ilium, Iowa City: Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five

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 , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Shankar, Coltrane, Whitman: Within You, Without You

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 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

All Saints Bookstore, Beijing

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 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

World, Globe, Planet: UCLA

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 , , , , , , , , , , | 42 Comments