I was leaving for home after a long, tiring day, depressed as I am these days at the thought of how hard the university is being hit by the current crisis, when a smiling colleague stopped me in the middle of the corridor. She’s an associate that teaches English Language and with whom I’ve only […]
I made the mistake of declaring to my family over lunch that I was very depressed as President Mas has decided to deduct yet another 5% off my wages, this time off the complement paid by the Generalitat (I’m a civil servant on the payroll of the Spanish Government). This unleashed not the sympathy one […]
I’ll be teaching again next year the elective ‘English Theatre’ and I’m reconsidering the texts I used 2 years ago. In that edition I asked my students to read two anthologies, Grahame Whybrow’s Modern Drama: Plays of the ’80s and ’90s and Alekz Seirz’s Twenty-First Century British Plays (both Methuen). 10 plays in total, 36 […]
To my surprise Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1979, English translation 1984), based on field work in late 1960s and early 1970s France, still makes perfect sense today. I don’t know whether this is because Spain is till catching up with the France he portrays, or because, essentially, Europe’s patterns of consumption have not changed that much […]
CEDRO is the Spanish organisation that protects the copyright of writers on books (and music scores, I mean sheet music); it is analogous to SGAE, which protects performing artists. Recently, CEDRO has sued UAB for 1 million euros, accusing my university of not restricting at all book piracy in our virtual classrooms (see http://www.lavanguardia.com/cultura/20120411/54283660307/cedro-uab-fotocopias.html). They […]
I have spent much of my time this long weekend glued to the 600 pages of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915). I picked up the yellowing, crumbling copy at UAB’s library to read for pleasure, after having read a while ago The Razor’s Edge (1944) –and yes, having seen the two film versions, […]
Last Saturday, 21 April, the Spanish Government issued a new decree (see BOE http://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2012/04/21/pdfs/BOE-A-2012-5337.pdf), cheerfully called “de medidas urgentes de racionalización del gasto público en el ámbito educativo.” According to this decree, although university teachers are still supposed to teach 24 ECTS credits a year (= 4 semestral subjects), this workload may be increased or […]
Last Sunday I went to see Alex Rigola’s production of Corolianus at Lliure. It was the first time I saw a Shakespeare without first reading the play but even so I could guess that something was very wrong as the performance only lasted for 75 minutes. The guy who appeared to be Corolianus’s main rival, […]
Next Monday is every Literature teacher’s favourite holiday (it is, isn’t it?): Sant Jordi’s –book day here in Catalonia. Holiday not in the sense that we Catalans don’t work on that day, but in the sense that civil society takes the streets to celebrate reading –or so claim the authorities on popular Catalan festivities. For […]
I have a spectacular headache and the problem is that I can’t take yet another painkiller. I know, I should not be writing. How did the headache come about? Planning the schedule for the next academic year, I mean for all the teachers in the English Studies BA. This is one of the duties of […]