Category Archives: books

.musecast Episode 11: Reboot

After a hiatus of more than six months, I’ve decided to reboot the .musecast. I have some small(ish) news on The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon in this episode, but I also talk about what caused the hiatus and my thoughts about the future of the .musecast. Any feedback from all of you would be appreciated. [Season 1 of the .musecast is currently offline due to blip.tv shutting down. Episodes will be reposted when circumstances permit me to do so. – Sean] Link list for Episode 11:…

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It All Begins Again

About a month ago I got word that my unpublished novel The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon had made the second round of this year’s Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award in the General Fiction category. This was certainly nice, but given how many steps there are in the Amazon contest, I didn’t make too big of a deal out of it at the time. I posted about it on my Twitter and Facebook, but I wanted to see if I got through to the quarterfinals before I made a…

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Bound to the System

“Fifty Shades of Grey” sparks marketing mania (Reuters) Thanks to its inclusion in a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic online video anthology, I’ve had the Lonely Island’s song “Threw It on the Ground” stuck in my head on and off for about a week. (Let me add here, as an aside, that I’m majorly bummed that I couldn’t make the pony con that’s going on in Ohio this weekend.) As I teach and encourage my students to question their assumptions, and not to let those…

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The Weight of a Library

About a week and a half ago, I took one of my classes to visit the campus library to learn how to do research there; like everywhere I’ve taught, the librarians there hold special classes where they teach students how to use the online databases the library subscribes to, so I have an opportunity to sit back and just add little tidbits and anecdotes to what the librarian has to say. I don’t think I’ve ever had one of these library instruction classes go so…

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Too Many Shades of Blah

In case you missed it, Amazon.com now has a 50 Shades of Grey-themed sub-store in its “sexual wellness” products. I’m not entirely sure how to take this; on the one hand, I think it shows the progress the kink community has made that Amazon is willing to make such a sub-store, complete with its own promotional images, for something that’s still considered deeply taboo by so many Americans. On the other hand, for another resurgence of kink in popular culture to be tied to a work…

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