Hoppin' Hegel, Batman!

I knew that next semester was going to be rough, but my professor for Hegelian and post-Hegelian literary theory just posted his reading list along with a Darth Vaderesque warning about the reading load. Yeesh!

I just ordered Eagleton's book for an early January brush-up (hopefully it'll show up while I'm out of town) and the Hegel tome to get cookin' over that. Fitzner told me this professor is a good one; I just hope my tail holds out.

All of a sudden translating two hundred lines of Beowulf a week started looking like the easy part of my semester...

Weekly Standard's Damage Control

"Don't Cry for Pinochet"

His embrace of economic reform seems unlikely to have sprung from a commitment to freedom, given the overarching contempt for liberty that characterized the rest of his government. Rather, in order to insulate himself from the consequences of his murderous seizure of power, Pinochet sought out political allies, and his free market reforms helped him to garner support domestically on the right, and also among members of the international community. One must be careful not to fall into Pinochet's trap--accepting his brutal seizure of power and tyrannical rule as a natural accompaniment of free market reforms. Propagandists on the left lost no time in seeking to discredit economic freedom by associating it with Pinochet. To this day, we hear from Moscow that it takes a Pinochet to implement economic reforms successfully; Vladimir Putin seems all too willing to have Pinochet's uniform taken in a few sizes so he can try it on.

Stalin does in fact discredit Leninism, and the Cultural Revolution does in fact discredit Maoism. Fascism was not corrupted by Hitler, and Milton Friedman's neoliberalism is not warped but embodied by Pinochet. Don't let any of the twentieth century ideologues try to bury their monsters in unmarked graves, especially not those who wound up on the winning sides of the world wars.

Back to the Classics

After a frenzy of post-Marxist theory and post-Freudian analysis--that is to say, after reading up on the last decade's scholarship for my end-of-semester papers--I've dug into Robert Fagles's translation of Homer's Iliad. To say that such a shift is a relief simply does no justice to the joy of reading old books without the nattering critics and their little academic careers. (I'm harboring no illusions--I'm certain that during my comps year I'll be sending off my own forgettable little articles to attempt to shore up my own little academic career.) I dusted off a reread of Virgil's Aeneid last Christmas, and if I have a few quiet hours this year, I'm probably going to consume another ancient epic.

Speaking of old books, my Plato course's evaluations came in today, and they were even better than the ones I got for last Spring's Hebrew Bible and/as Literature class. (Not sure if the latter link will work; I'll update it when I get access to the department page to post spring syllabi.) I could claim some sort of grand skill in teaching freshmen, but a year ago, I got some of the most wretched reviews I'd ever gotten. (That was my fourth year teaching college.) The change is not in my ability but in the texts at hand; college students know good books from mediocre ones, and when I started teaching Job and Republic instead of "Divinity and Pornography," they started reacting better to my classes. Now, as I gear up to teach Joseph in January and the Psalms in February, I know that I don't have to be a fabulous teacher to make this work, and I also know that if I do perform fabulously, I'll be leaping forth from the shoulders of great texts.

It makes one want to get back to school, no? :)

I'm not that fat...

Mike from the Ooze has once again photoshopped me.

The Feminisation of Chile

The strong women of a generation ago were not the product of an evolving society, but created by events – and I don’t mean Allende’s experiment, in which women were mostly helpmeets. Mónica González, the country’s top investigative journalist, who was jailed for her human rights stories in the 1980s, credits the dictatorship for that brief awakening. ‘Since the people killed, imprisoned and disappeared were mostly men, women had to confront authority as never before. Facing up to the army and the police in search of husbands or sons, joining forces and speaking out politically, going to work for the first time.’

In the wake of Pinochet's death, this article about the years since his regime lost power was pretty interesting. That feminism arose out of the ashes of neoliberalism is quite interesting; I don't spend a great deal of time thinking about gender issues (sorry to my feminist theorist and gender theorist colleagues), but this is one of those moments in which power and (bad) government and gender come together in ways that deserve some thought.

Pinochet Dead

Mixed Reaction to Pinochet's Death

Another of the Cold War's monsters now faces divine judgment. May his years as dictator of Chile serve as a warning to empires--God knows with whom you ally.

School of the Americas Watch

Oh Dear

It seems that I've accidentally wiped out a fair bit of my blog's goodies while fiddling with BetaBlogger. I suppose I should treat this as an opportunity rather than a curse, so check back frequently for the new look of Hardly the Last Word!

We're doomed!

Casting for Nativity Plays

I'm thanking the heavens as I type that I've never had to cast one of these legendary affairs, but the article is just too funny:

Come Christmas, there are always those cynics who dismiss infant nativity plays as pointless charades. What lessons, they ask, are to be learnt in the modern age from watching kids trying to work out what a "virgin's womb" is and how not to "abhor" it? The answer is many, for all concerned – not in the tale itself, but in the telling.

"Anyone can be a Shepherd, but there's only One Mary"

Hit Counter

I have to republish to get the hit counter to show up, so here goes...

(It's right below the "my library" bit.)

These pics received honorable mention when we were making up Christmas cards.

 

Some of the Micah-and-Christmas-tree pictures that didn't make it onto the Christmas cards but are still darn cute

 

Write your own caption! 

Micah and the 2006 Gilmour Christmas tree 

I don't know what happened to Micah's hair, but he seems to be enjoying whatever it is 

Crapula

The sermon went well yesterday, and in the process of researching for it, I ran into one of the most fun vice-words I've ever seen, the Latin crapula.

My Latin class ends tomorrow (exempt from the final), and my students upload their portfolios tomorrow evening. Friday is the Old English exam, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem since I've got Thursday completely off. I've got a genuinely good head of steam on my Spenser paper, and if I play my cards right I might just get it turned in this weekend.

I know the last few entries have been grocery lists, most containing the same items, but my grad student readers know that such lists, and the gradual deterioration of such lists, keep us going in these closing days of the semester.