NY Times overview of Harold Bloom’s career

HERE.

I for one always enjoy reading him.

My favorite passage by the reviewer:

“The New Critics, the best of them skilled technicians in the art of close reading, narrowed their study to individual poems, each seen as an airtight mechanism or operating system that, if painstakingly dissected, would yield its hidden meaning, usually reducible to a cluster of ironies and paradoxes.”

The last phrase after the comma is what I love.

Webmoor’s account of my STS talk at Oxford

Timothy Webmoor discusses my May 11 STS talk at Said Business school at Oxford ON HIS BLOG.

In the photo, at far left, can be seen the right side of Steve Woolgar’s head.

staying on Lovecraft’s street

I’ll be in a bead & breakfast on Benefit Street in Providence for a good chunk of the summer. Hat tip to Irena, my Brown Ph.D. friend, for the lead.

out like an opium fiend

I threw the blanket over her, and she’s making not the slightest effort to dig out as she usually does. She’s emotionally spent by that little trip.

second image of Dr. Ahmed and Tamanya

He’s still clipping her toenails here.

By the way, he also looked in her ears with a sort of microscope, and her ears are fine. No ear mites or anything like that.

Another anecdote… Many Egyptians are simply confused by the name Tamanya. (We’d be confused too, if an Egyptian in America called their new cat “eight” just because they thought it was a pretty word.) But Dr. Salah thought it was a nice name, and made a numerological joke in saying that I should call her “Lucky Tamanya.”

big girl goes back to the vet

Though it’s Saturday, I went into the office for 6 hours to finish reading the faculty grant applications from this cycle.

By the time I returned home, it was time to take Tamanya back to the vet. Her first trip there, you may recall, was on April 25, just 2 days after I took her from the alley.

I have a soft carrying case for her. It wasn’t hard to put her in. Though she can be quite a fighter in paw vs. hand or teeth vs. hand combat, she is a sort of passive fatalist whenever placed in carrying cases. She doesn’t try to fight or scream her way out, and though I thought she was depressed a few weeks ago when putting her in one, it’s not really depression– just a quiet, mildly worried fatalism. “Whatever will happen, will happen.” That seems to be her attitude. (And now that we’re home she has fallen fast asleep, emotionally exhausted.)

But how much progress she has made in the past 26 days since the first trip to the vet!

weight on April 25= 0.3 kg
weight on May 21= 0.85 kg

She has nearly tripled in weight!

In April her gums were a deathly white, due to anemia from the worms. Now she does apparently still have a small number of worms (though no fleas), but her gums are a vibrant pink; I saw them myself.

She was very good about her first vaccination. She loved the taste of the first deworming dose, like last time. But then the vets played a trick on her, and gave her the second and rather foul-tasting variety of deworming dose, a quarter of which she spit out in surprise at the terrible taste.

She still really hates the rectal thermometer. Really, really hates it. And then when they took a stool sample (which is how they found the small number of remaining worms) they apparently don’t use a laxative as I expected, but again some sort of horrible rectal probe, which she predictably also hated.

On duty tonight were young vets Dr. Ahmed and Dr. Mohammed, assisted by Amina. After awhile the big boss dropped by, Dr. Salah, who does all the surgeries and also owns the place. He seemed genuinely pleased by Tamanya’s condition less than 4 weeks after being hauled off the streets, said she looked “vibrant and vital,” and had nothing but good things to say about my job in raising her. I was as proud as a 10-year-old with all A’s on a report card. (However, I asked a lot of questions, and there are a few small things I haven’t been doing right and will change starting today.) Some of the credit for her condition also goes to babysitter Wafaa, a real cat expert, who had her during my week in England and sent her home looking better than ever.

Like all “parents,” I also naturally agree to buy everything they tell me will make her healthier, including the multi-vitamins they had in stock.

The photo below shows Dr. Ahmed clipping Tamanya’s toenails, maybe 45 minutes ago. Dr. Ahmed kindly agreed to let me take the photo. Nice young guy, very gentle with animals. (Behind him, that’s Dr. Salah’s office.)

review of Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter

My review of Bennett’s book has apparently been published at last, in new formations #71. Details HERE.

The page numbers of the proofs I corrected were 125-130; presumably those are still the page numbers in the published edition.

One side-effect of the fact that things generally take so long to get published is that I can seldom remember the effort and strain that went into composing any given piece. This review was written in early May, 2010: over a year ago. And I can’t really remember writing it, so when it now appears in print this feels almost like magic.