The Loss of Intellect by Ted Morrissey
I appreciate NAR’s invitation to contribute to its blog.
My review of William H. Gass’s novel Middle C for NAR was a warm-up for a longer critical paper that I’ll present at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, and in preparing to write that paper I re-read several of Gass’s essays and interviews, including an interview from 1995 that was published in the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 3.1 (1997), and reprinted in Conversations with William H. Gass (2003), edited by Theodore G. Ammon.
The interviewer, Idiko Kaposi, asked Gass his view on emerging (mid-90s) technologies and how they would affect writing, reading, and ultimately, thinking. As a teacher, mainly of eighteen-year-olds, looking back at Gass’s remarks from nearly two decades ago, I find his insights disturbingly accurate. Gass, besides being an award-winning novelist and literary critic, was also a professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, since retired.
Gass suspected that the…
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Anthology released by Twelve Winters Press
I’m pleased to report that [Ex]tinguished & [Ex]tinct: An Anthology of Things That No Longer [Ex]ist was released last week by Twelve Winters Press, which I founded in 2012. The anthology is a collection of poems, prose poems and flash fiction all dealing with the theme of extinguished and extinct, from animals to plants to languages to eras, and much, much more. The anthology was edited, and in fact the project was directed, by John McCarthy, with much support from the Press’s associate editor Pamm Collebrusco.
John and Pamm received thousands of submissions last fall and eventually narrowed it down to work by 37 writers and poets from the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and Singapore: Elmaz Abinader, Majnun Ben-David, Lauren Camp, Jennifer Clark, Rebecca Clever, Susan Cohen, Meg Eden, Frances Gapper, Damyanti Ghosh, John Gosslee, Laura Hartenberger, Parul Kapur Hinzen, Daniel Hudon, Douglas Jackson, Zeke Jarvis, Amanda Larson, Christina Lovin, Mark McKain, Sarah Fawn Montgomery, Elizabeth Deanna Morris, Travis Mossotti, Ezra Olson, Lynn Pedersen, Cindy Rinne, Matt Rotman, Freya Sachs, Susan Sailer, Danielle Sellers, Mary Senger, M.E. Silverman, Judith Skillman, Darren Stein, Ursula Villarreal-Moura, J. Weintraub, Lenore Weiss, Laurelyn Whitt, and Lee Tyler Williams.
I had nothing to do with selecting the work and in fact didn’t read the pieces until they were already laid out in the proof of the anthology. Perhaps I’m biased, but I was pleasantly surprised at just how exceptional the work is. It’s literary and accessible, and provides incredible variety in both focus and form. The link above is to the anthology on Amazon; however, it’s available from a growing list of global sellers, including Barnes & Noble and Espresso Book Machine. Check the Poetry Titles page at the Twelve Winters Press site for a complete list (which will be expanding daily for a while).
Currently only the print edition of the anthology is available. We’re working on digital editions (complexly structured poetry and e-readers are not always happy bedfellows, so it’s taking longer to get the digital editions out than we’d hoped — but we want them to be as readable as possible and to do justice to the original work).
My thanks to John and Pamm, and also to my partner in all things, Melissa Sievers, for her support and assistance, especially with mailing out the anthology copies to contributors.
Keep an eye on Twelve Winters Press as we have several exciting things in the works, including J.D. Schraffenberger’s forthcoming poetry collection, The Waxen Poor, with a tentative release date in August. Follow the Press @twelvewinters.
Not speaking about Danielson Framework per se, but
Sir Ken Robinson has several TED Talks regarding education, and his “How to Escape Education’s Death Valley” is an especially appropriate follow-up to my last post about the Danielson Group’s Framework for Teaching Evaluation Instrument. Robinson, who is very funny and engaging, doesn’t reference Charlotte Danielson and her group per se, but he may as well. The Danielson Group’s Framework, which has been adopted as a teacher evaluation instrument in numerous states, including Illinois, is emblematic — in fact, the veritable flagship — of everything that’s wrong with education in America, according to Robinson.
Treat yourself to twenty minutes of Robinson’s wit and wisdom:
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