Last Friday 11 as I got off the train at UAB a strong smell of garbage hit my nose. As I walked towards the Department using a back lane, I could soon see that the whole area from the station to the Faculties was covered in litter: crushed cans, plastic bags, rests of snacks… Another […]
I’m co-organising a three-day conference for which we have received proposals to present 31 round tables, 4 workshops and 146 papers. Yes, very successful. I happen to be coordinating the programme and, well, it’s very complicated because with 90 minutes sessions we need 8 simultaneous classrooms, which also makes it highly unlikely that panel attendance […]
I have spent whatever free time I’ve managed to hoard in the last ten days glued to the 1042 pages of Neal Stephenson’s last novel Reamde. The volume is not only very thick but also trade-paperback size, which means it is huge indeed. I’ve gone through Stephenson’s Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon (twice), The […]
After one month lecturing in my computer-less classroom, I’ve got used to it and even find myself enjoying very much the absence of a screen. I’ve gone back in time, no doubt, to offer that kind of old-fashioned type of Literature teaching based on massive doses of (my) reading aloud. Dickens helps very much in […]
I have plenty of work to do today but I feel too depressed to start without letting steam out here first. This depression stems from hearing news the whole week through about the pay cuts that our fellow civil servants, the doctors employed by the Institut Català de la Salut, are being forced to accept. […]
As a teacher I must say that one of the greatest satisfactions in seeing ex-students succeed professionally. Of course, ex-students who succeed in one’s own academic professional field elicit a little (or much…) envy, but that is truly fine: a healthy reminder of one’s limitations and even mediocrity, to which honest teachers must always be […]
Yes, a year ago yesterday I posted my first entry (or did I enter my first post?, the semantics are unclear to me). 93 posts or entries later, I’m still here, which comes as a surprise to me, with enough energy, I believe, to go on for another year at least. Or, rather, it’s not […]
One of my doctoral students, Rafael Miranda, has just passed his viva (or ‘defensa’) after submitting a brilliant doctoral dissertation on cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk. I am personally VERY proud to have helped him make such an interesting contribution to the field of Science-Fiction Studies. Particularly because that field is so tiny in Spanish English Studies […]
You might be familiar with the French film Sarah’s Key (Gilles Paquet-Brenner, 2010), originally titled Elle s’appelait Sarah, like the best-selling novel (2007) by Tatiana de Rosnay which it adapts. I saw the film, loving, as usual, Kristin Scott-Thomas’s fine performance. She plays Julia, a journalist who doggedly follows the clues leading her to discover […]
Appalled? Amazed? Astonished? Dismayed? How does this piece of news make you feel?: Bompiani, Umberto Eco’s publishers, have just announced the publication on October 5 of a simplified version of his best-selling historical thriller The Name of the Rose (1980)… simplified by the author himself to make it more accessible to new readers. The article […]