Brief Hiatus

Dear Friends,

I apologize to you for being slow to acknowledge your many valuable comments on postings here of late. I've fallen considerably behind, and have taken a brief break — which will probably put me even more behind in replying to your comments. I'm not sure if I will be posting much here in the next few days, and that may be just as well, since I have begun to feel considerably stale, and, as my mother might have said, worn to a frazzle. All of which may well mean you will welcome having a little break from me, too! Wishing all of you a very good week . . . .

The graphic: a landscape sketch for Thomas Eakins's famous painting "The Swimming Hole," from Wikimedia Commons (scanned from Doreen Bolger and Sarah Cash, Thomas Eakins and the Swimming Picture; original in Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas).

Sunday Thoughts: Pho, Fried Plantains, and Welcome Tables

Lines overheard in a Vietnamese restaurant in St. Paul:

Good Friday Reflections: A Visit to an Art Museum

I've been a bit distracted the past several days, since I had a lecture to give Thursday, and a meeting with the publisher of my forthcoming book yesterday.  The meeting went very well (the lecture seemed to do so, too), and it's definitely a relief to know that the publisher likes the work I've done, since I was anxious that he'd be horrified by a manuscript that I feared might appear blowzy and diffuse, after I printed the whole galumphing thing out.

Masculinity in Crisis: A Recurring Meme at Times of Cultural Stress

Another link to a recent posting: I blogged recently about the wide appeal of the show “Mad Men,” and my suspicion that we’re watching this popular series not because it exposes the pitfalls of the socially constructed definition of masculinity of the late modern period, as many of us claim.  We’re watching precisely because we want to reassure ourselves that a masculinity we imagine to be under siege in postmodernity remains continuous with the hyper-maleness of modernity at its peak.

And so I’m interested to watch Brian Safi’s recent infoMania send-up of the accentuated machismo of recent commercials: Masculinity is in crisis!  Let’s bring back the real man in this era of economic downturn and a black man in the White House!