William Heise | July 11, 2010
Okay, let’s review. Here’s how I look at art. The viewer starts out with a Status Quo (that’s ‘the way things are now,’ for the less Latin inclined). But the clever artist has identified a conflict in the Status Quo. The introduction of conflict into the previously untroubled world of the Status Quo means that [...]
William Heise | July 10, 2010
I found this on the the Internet today. It’s a question to Michael Berube, future President of the MLA (the organization for bigwigs in language and literature) and author of a book about the sad, sad state of the job market, Employment of English, about whether he or she should go to graduate school or [...]
William Heise | July 6, 2010
…and I’m still traumatized. The good stuff starts at 0:55 and continues through 1:20 or so. What was wrong with my teachers?
William Heise | June 11, 2010
Okay, I missed a day. Sorry readers. But I have yesterday’s post today. I’ve been reading Brad Gooch’s City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. Frank was a member of the New York School of poetry. After serving in WWII (the Big One), he availed himself of veteran’s assistance and went to Harvard. [...]
William Heise | June 8, 2010
With the fragmentation of news sources, the Enlightenment ideal has come under pressure. We are living in a world where people feel the need to only read something when they know in advance that they are going to agree with what they’re going to hear. This means that no one actually reads works of other [...]
William Heise | June 7, 2010
Last week I told you, my readers, that I would post something tomorrow. Well, tomorrow turned into another day, and then another. I plead the excuse of having been mistaken about the completion of my book (it needed one more week, after all). Last week’s nightmare is over. The lesson I have learned is to [...]
William Heise | May 22, 2010
I had forgotten I wrote this on MEDTEXL in March of 2000. It is advice about how I got out of my academic experience relatively unscathed. It is aimed at guiding fellow academics out of the labyrinth, but it provides a sound enough introduction to the entrepreneurial path that I have followed that I thought [...]
William Heise | May 22, 2010
Okay, I’ve been thinking about Medtextl all morning, and I thought I’d share with you one of my favorite moments on the list. [Be forewarned: I have added the sonnet itself, which was not in the original post]. The post was originally titled “Style Anecdote.” —– I have learned what little I know about style [...]
William Heise | May 22, 2010
I wanted to explain my ambiguous feelings about academia to my friend Amy, who asked. I had left academia and have not looked back. So I have been thinking and thinking about this, and I thought that the best thing I could do was to give an email exchange that I’d had with a student [...]
William Heise | May 13, 2010
Here’s one reason why I get in so much trouble with, not only academic liberals, but with conservatives. Even my closest friends don’t have infinite patience for my philosophical antics. My dear friend, who lists his political affiliation on his Facebook information page as ‘Crazy-Eyed Liberal,’ posted a facetious article on Facebook with the title [...]
