Posts by Brooke Watkins

2011 was a great year for fiction — novels and short story collections alike. Many “Best of” lists published so far are spot-on, but let's face it: although literature has some notable guidelines for what makes it “good,” individual taste still has a lot do with it. Below are the page-turning titles that had me staying up late, avoiding chores, not looking at Facebook, and inspiring that splendid submergence in a story that never, ever gets old. In fact, the older I get, the closer I come to sprouting a third eye just so I can read more.

A friend of mine has recently taken to reading Moby Dick on her phone, using the Kindle for Android app. Although I like to make fun of her for reading such a formidable book on a tiny screen, she is adamant that her method is much less intimidating, because she doesn’t have to 1) lug the book around, or 2) face its visible girth, taunting her daily with unread pages. No matter your feelings on print v. electronic books, the classics, as well as the not-so-classics, are on the Web and ready to download to your computer and portable e-reading device for free.  

Whether you’re in the midst of researching or writing your project, the free bibliographic management tool Zotero could save you A LOT of time. Join me for an introductory workshop on this free Firefox plug-in that helps you gather, manage, analyze, and share your resources. Learn the basic functionality of the program as well as how to integrate your Zotero library with word-processing software for footnotes and bibliographies -- Yes, you can change the citation style of your book or dissertation from Chicago to APA with the click of a button!

Have you ever encountered an entirely new landscape or situation and simultaneously noticed that you don’t have the words to describe it or to ask questions about it? It’s not that you’ve forgotten the words or have suddenly regressed to a state of preverbal babbling, you realize, but that you’ve found a corner of experience that is still remote to you, a forest still overgrown with your own ignorance - your "unknown unknowns" have waxed into "known unknowns," and the effect has left you speechless.

"The objective of satire," a writer once told me, "is death."

But death - especially immediate death - is never as entertaining as a good crippling.

In 1708, the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift executed a multi-part media hoax against the astrologer and almanac-maker John Partridge, and although Swift didn't kill him directly, he certainly succeeded in making, as he called it, "sin and folly bleed." Swift disliked Partridge, claiming he was a quack whose almanacs purported to scientifically predict the events of the coming year. He also hated him for writing propaganda against the Anglican Church, in which Swift was an ordained priest.