Jacob Bender's Blog

Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

In what I hope will be a satisfying sequel to my previous last post, I am thrilled to announce the publication of my book Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2020).  

If you are (understandably) hesitant to pay the exorbitant library prices of $119.99 on Amazon or 85,59 € on Palgrave's website, I am pleased to make the entire book available here as a free PDF.

Link.

(This is all Open Access and legal and above board, if you're worried about that sort...

How I Finished My Dissertation in One Year

Note: I entitle this how I finished my dissertation in one year, because what worked for me won't necessarily work for you, and vice-versa.  If you find anything I suggest here personally unhelpful, please discard it without a second thought.  But a number of classmates have asked me lately how on earth I finished my dissertation so quickly, so I post my process here for anyone else out there who might also be frantically googling for help.

Some caveats: I do not have any sort of for...

On Swan Songs

[One last attempt to properly capstone and wrap-up this silly ol' blog]
Amidst our current vinyl Renaissance, I've noticed that the one Beatles LP you are guaranteed to find in every surviving record shop, in every book-store music section, and on the shelf of every hipster, collector, nostalgist and enthusiast, is Abbey Road.  Where once upon a time Sgt. Pepper, Revolver, Rubber Soul, and/or the White Album garnered the lion's share of the attention, now as the years turn to decades and...

On Cuban Currency

We briefly interrupt the silence of this retired blog to bring a public service announcement to any and all stray googlers prepping a trip to Cuba.

There are two national currencies in Cuba (I learned this the hard way): The CUC (Cuban Convertible) and the CUP (Cuban Peso), also known as MN (Moneda Nacional).  Now pay attention.

The CUC is pegged to the dollar; that is, 1 CUC is equal to 1 USD.  The CUP, however, divides into the CUC by 24.  That is, 24 CUP make up 1 CUC.  A...

The Adjunct in the Latter Days

This is not a revival of normal communications; on the contrary, this might just be the capstone.

Three-odd years ago, as I left SLCC to return to grad school at Iowa, I wrote a brief blog-post intended to encapsulate the experience of being a community college adjunct (a job I began the same year I began this blog).  This last Fall, SLCC put out a call for submissions for their inaugural community anthology, so I submitted it, feeling that if it belonged anywhere, it was with the place t...

On the Evolution of Teaching Letter From a Birmingham Jail

When I first started teaching college composition 6 Autumns ago, I threw Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" onto the syllabus mainly because it was a famous essay and I was a last-minute hire still trying desperately to flesh out a course plan.  In my painful naivety, I taught "Letter" like a historical artifact, a relic from some bygone and incomprehensible era--fantastically well-written of course and well worth modeling, but fundamentally dated.  The student...

On the Evolution of Teaching Letter From Birmingham Jail

When I first started teaching college composition 6 Autumns ago, I threw Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" onto the syllabus mainly because it was a famous essay and I was a last-minute hire still trying desperately to flesh out a course plan.  In my painful naivety, I taught "Letter" like a historical artifact, a relic from some bygone and incomprehensible era--fantastically well-written of course and well worth modeling, but fundamentally dated.  I even felt...

Modernism and Fascism

A hundred years ago, amidst global depressions and failing democracies and rising xenophobia and racism, populaces across the Western world turned towards strong-man demagogues, to stick it to all those dithering, do-nothing congresses and parliaments and cut through all the red-tape and stand up for the working man and the church and to drive out all the immigrants and shout out grandiose promises to make their respective countries great again.  This especially occurred in Germany, Ital...

The Last Time the Cubs Won the World Series...

I of course can only put it in temporal terms that would most resonate with me personally:

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, TS Eliot was still at Harvard, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock not even a twinkle in his eye (the Cubs had not dared disturb the Universe).

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Ernest Hemingway was 9--the Sun would not Also Rise over the Cubs for another century.

The last time the Cubs won the World Series, Ezra Pound had yet to arrive in London, let alo...

On "Checking In" at Standing Rock

So early yesterday morning, I opened up Facebook to see that one of my friends had checked in at Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota!  Not only one, but several!  In fact, the list kept on growing!  At first it appeared that a bunch of my old classmates at University of Iowa had taken a road trip together, but then I saw folks checking in from Chicago, Seattle, and even L.A.!  Overwhelmed, I considered how the most I had done so far is donate a few bucks to th...