Essai
Lessons from Emilio
In the image, he is on the Inca Trail, alone, a floppy hat and sunglasses, his hands resting on the top of his walking stick as he waits for me to reach him. I am wheezing from altitude dizziness as we ascend.
Nazgul
After all, I was maybe 15 years old, skinny and pale as pasta, my “Lord of Chaos” badge hanging crookedly from a fading Dragonslayer t-shirt. And there was Gandalf, a 280 pound beer-stinking sasquatch of a man …
The Challenge of Finding Wisdom
I have seen years and scores of students succumb to the allure of Beavis and Butthead and Seattle grunge, Instagram and “What Does the Fox Say?”, never suspecting that Descartes’ dualism or Conrad’s “The horror” could be significant moments for true reflection.
To the Tower
I’ve always found power in creating story; it’s my way of creating the space I wish to inhabit.
Spells of Protection
We can read this deliberate ambiguity in a number of ways: the particular puzzled psychoses of repressed females, for instance, or the dysfunctional power relationships within families; the self-struggling identities of adolescent development or even the unreasonable demands of an outside world to extract simple clarity from complex humanity.
Zack’s Zombie Survival Guide: Ch. 5 – Aftermath
Like the characters themselves, viewers are left with a futility that either their hours were wasted or they must see the film as a “sunk cost” and thereby invest still more time in prequels and spin-offs.
Zack’s Zombie Survival Guide: Ch. 4 – Emergent Species
While it’s true that Snyder has been granted a larger, freer role in producing Army of the Dead than he has been allowed in previous films, we can’t forget that this very freedom is being marketed to us; Snyder is still caught up in this $90 million budget.
Zack’s Zombie Survival Guide: Ch. 3 – Practical Guide
I despair (only a bit) that, as much as I enjoy a good zombie film, Zack Snyder’s heist-zombie film with a big budget will eat itself as well.
Zack’s Zombie Survival Guide: Ch. 2 – Equipment
What has yet to be developed is a zombie-specific set of criteria which determine the quality of a literary event, a tragic absence in our culture, which this manual seeks to rectify.
Zack’s Zombie Survival Guide: Ch. 1 – Identification
I hate zombies (and consequently love the films) because I dread becoming one, living, dead, or undead. Is there a worse fate than the loss of mind? Zombies speak directly to that too-real possibility.
Ghost of Writings Past
In some important sense, even in this political chaos, there must be an accountability for all composition.
Rhetorics of Meanings in Acts of Writing: Teaching Students Language
How can we pretend to teach critical thinking without inquiry into the very forms of communication we use to express that thought? How can we make students of writing also philosophers of writing?
Essai –
After Michel deMontaigne, to essai is to engage in a prose act of skepticism, an exploration of a topic as perceived or understood by the writer. You might think of it as a “testing,” an experiment in idea-making. Alas, our education system long ago turned this critical verb into a static noun scored by rubrics in red ink for purposes political and often crippling.
