Digital Commons Network^™

Inside Out [Published Under The Title "Sam Shepard Is A Place"], Marianne Rogoff

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

"Sam Shepard is a place, and in The One Inside (Knopf 2017) you’re there with him on the ground in the American desert. Shepard doesn’t like to fly so maybe this gives him a different point of view from the rest of us who are always taking off, in the air, and landing. His characters are found in motel rooms on empty highways, on porches, wandering open space, asleep under overpasses, walking next to the interstate as cars fly by so fast they never stop to notice anyone’s there."

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Review Of "Into The Beautiful North" By Luis Alberto Urrea, Marianne Rogoff

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

"There are still many places in the world where electricity is a luxury and bandidos regularly assert power over powerless villages, where a plate of beans has to suffice as daily bread, and the lure of Hollywood cowboys and television heroes encourages the imagination to believe in fantasies. Escapism is a form of hope. The men of Tres Camarones, the dusty pueblito in Sinaloa, Mexico, at the center of Luis Alberto Urrea’s new novel, Into the Beautiful North, have escaped to the U.S. The fantasy was, the men cross the border, acquire riches, and return to the land of lagoons …

Is The Internet Ruining Our Lives? On "The Cult Of The Amateur" By Andrew Keen, Marianne Rogoff

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

"Not everyone will agree with the premise of Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today’s User-generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values, recently out in paperback. Are you a throwback if you do? Are you a cultist if you don’t? Which is worse?"

In Search Of Our Brains: On Teaching "Proust Was A Neuroscientist" By Jonah Lehrer, Marianne Rogoff

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

"I have always wanted to teach a semester of freshman English using a single text, moving students via rich allusions out beyond it for further reading according to their individual interests. Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer is a collection of essays linking contemporary findings in neuroscience with visionary knowledge dreamed up by writers and artists a hundred years ago. Concepts like Walt Whitman's poetic "body electric" and Virginia Woolf's psychological "stream of consciousness" are proven to have physical origins in our brains and bodies. I created a whole course around the book in Fall '08 at California College …

Irreconcilable Differences With God: On "The Monk Downstairs" By Tim Farrington, Marianne Rogoff

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

"The Monk Downstairs is an easy read about God. It seriously ponders the split between the contemplative life and life in the world while describing the most bedeviling aspects of simple survival on the secular plane."

Two Necessities Of Poetry: Plenitude And Exuberance, Marianne Rogoff

Collected Faculty and Staff Scholarship

"Alicia Ostriker advocates a 'poetics of ardor,' one which is not detached, objective, or merely intellectual, instead a poetry that embraces a big-hearted and practical definition of what erotic means. Dancing at the Devil’s Party is mostly about women’s poetry but Ostriker also reminds us of the wide-reaching sensuality of Whitman, Hopkins, Keats, and other sexy male forebears who permitted love to appear in their work."