I’m reading the Harry Potter saga again –for the third time around– in preparation for my elective subject next semester. Also the academic materials that I’m going to use as background reading, and which include the Casebook recently edited (2012) by Hallett and Huey. In this volume there’s a very interesting piece by Pamela Ingleton, […]
Last week, during the opening of the current academic year, our Rector, Ferran Sancho, explained that the University of California at Berkeley, roughly the same size as UAB in students and staff, has a budget of 300 million euros –ours is 30 (and fast diminishing). Since then the sing-song ‘ten times more money’ has taken […]
I simply love MTV’s series Catfish (Tuesdays 22:00). This is a series inspired by the eponymous 2010 documentary directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. The film focused on the romantic disappointment of Ariel’s brother, Yaniv (Niv), when he finds out that the pretty twenty-something woman he’s fallen in love with on the internet does […]
Since I managed to open my website –despite the little technical help we get and the odd quirks of the DRUPAL programme– I’ve been wondering about its possibilities for self-publication. My institution insists that self-published work should go to its digital depository, yet where the actual file is placed is ultimately quite irrelevant. What matters […]
A couple of days ago the PIAAC results were published. This is a test designed to measure the educational competences of adults (16-65) in the 23 countries that are members of OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). The Spanish Government’s webpage summarises the catastrophe (see http://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/ServiciosdePrensa/NotasPrensa/MinisteriorEducacionCulturayDeporte/2013/081013InformePIAAC). Spanish adults occupy the second last position in […]
I have already written a few posts connected with conferences and if I am repeating the same ideas, this must be because things are not changing. I am back from a three-day conference, which makes number 57 in the long list of academic events I have attended since 1994 (not that many, really). As usual […]
Trying to find an adequate novel for a student’s BA dissertation (or Treball de Fi de Grau), I finally read Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic Sunset Song (1932). I say finally because I am indeed very much interested in Scottish fiction but have huge gaps in my reading list, like this one. Reviews and academic criticism […]
Re-reading for the umpteenth time Oliver Twist I finally paid attention to something I’d ignored in the prologue by Philip Horner to the Penguin Classics edition (2002). This refers to Dickens’ publicly expressed opinions on capital punishment and how they should colour our reading of Fagin’s paradoxically unseen public execution. Intriguingly, both Dickens and William […]
If you care to check my entries for mid-September 2011 and 2012 you will find more or less the same content. In 2011, I was given recently revamped classroom 302 and I commented that “We have two tiny windows, a blind is broken and temperatures inside the classroom were yesterday at 15:00 in the afternoon […]
Sorry about the unimaginative allusion in the title to David Bowie’s wonderful 1980s record (LP, not CD…). What else could I use to recall one of my main childhood terrors? Yes, I’m writing here today about memory and, particularly, about the childhood terrors that remain with us for decades, in this case consciously. Yet, at […]