gholmes4a - Network

Interior of the Brooklyn Sanitary Fair, 1864, at the original Brooklyn Academy of Music on Montague Street. The Sanitary Fairs raised funds...

Interior of the Brooklyn Sanitary Fair, 1864, at the original Brooklyn Academy of Music on Montague Street. The Sanitary Fairs raised funds for better healthcare for Civil War soldiers.

I just randomly learned that Jean-Michel Basquiat's father was named Gérard. Go, team!

I just randomly learned that Jean-Michel Basquiat's father was named Gérard. Go, team!

It's easy for scholarly work to feel invisible working off the tenure track, so: I published some things! And I'm excited about a...

It's easy for scholarly work to feel invisible working off the tenure track, so: I published some things! And I'm excited about a special issue now in the works on the long & complicated career of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, apart from the condescending quasi-mentorship and iffy posthumous publishing of Emily Dickinson for which he's mostly now remembered.

https://english.umd.edu/news/gerard-holmes-publishes-new-work-emily-dickinson

I kept forgetting to post this on twitter at the time, so I'm doing it now, here: a few weeks ago, I saw a DeLorean in the wild. It was...

I kept forgetting to post this on twitter at the time, so I'm doing it now, here: a few weeks ago, I saw a DeLorean in the wild. It was pulling into a wealthy-suburban shopping plaza a few cars behind me. I'm reasonably sure the driver was going through the Wendy's drive-thru but I was in a hurry. It was not quite as beat as the Back to the Future car, but neither was it restored to Reagan-era coke-fever-dream pristineness.

As part of my work for a small educational foundation, I sit in on Trustee investment committee meetings with the people who move the money...

As part of my work for a small educational foundation, I sit in on Trustee investment committee meetings with the people who move the money around. I have never had enough money to think about investsing, so I'm learning a lot, and I've never felt more like a spy at work.

They're all smart, pleasant, good at what they do. But, without going into detail, you're right not to trust them. When your incentive is to keep the client happy, and you do that by outperforming the markets, full employment and increasing salaries (not theirs!) are bad; people going back to work in-person despite Covid numbers increasing, and higher interest rates to slow hiring and depress salaries are good.

It's ten years since Sandy Hook. My daughter was the same age as those kids, attending a small-town elementary school in Vermont, a...

It's ten years since Sandy Hook. My daughter was the same age as those kids, attending a small-town elementary school in Vermont, a state with - at the time - gun laws about as free & easy as Texas. I learned a lot about guns over the next few years, especially the ways Americans fetishize them, and I suspect now we'll never have meaningful gun control.

After about a week of weird silence, the head of the NRA angrily insisted that the solution was more guns, in classrooms, everywhere, and blamed the godless left: all the lunacy to which we have become accustomed.

In retrospect, this looks like a turning point, leading directly to the moment we're in now, in which a heavily-armed, angry minority of the population insists on the primacy of their rights with utter indifference to the rights of everyone else. Challenge their ideas or even their funhouse-mirror version of the facts, and the threat of violence burbles up. In other words, Trump, Inc. was watching the news, too, in 2012.

In the early-morning crepuscular light, walking the dog this morning, I saw a fox run by, across the streetcorner we were approaching....

In the early-morning crepuscular light, walking the dog this morning, I saw a fox run by, across the streetcorner we were approaching. Beau's eyesight is not the best these days, and the fox in movement was *silent*. He never even noticed. If we'd been 15 seconds earlier, they might've met face to face, a scene I've been playing out in my head since. Beau is in some respects smaller than a full-grown fox, and utterly helpless.

This fall, a student in a freshman writing class I teach disappeared partway through the semester. Then he got back in touch and we had a...

This fall, a student in a freshman writing class I teach disappeared partway through the semester. Then he got back in touch and we had a long talk the other day. He'd gotten overwhelmed trying to figure out what to write about. He said, "I was in my dorm," which is a mess: the HVAC system so broken the university just pulled it out, so temperatures spiked up as high as 100 F during a recent warm-spell, "and I looked around and thought, what if I write about my own experience here?" So now his final paper is about how the university can create conditions conducive to the learning students are there to do. It's an unusual privilege, one I don't want to forget, to see someone find their own voice, realize they have more agency than they knew, and see why they're doing the thing that only felt like an obligation before.