I started Interminable Rambling in August 2015. On this site, I provide reflections on African American, American, and Southern Literature, American popular culture and politics, and pedagogy. Interminable Rambling arose out of the blog I maintained for the Ernest J Gaines Center. There, I wrote about items in the center’s archives, Gaines’ works, and texts that related to Gaines and Louisiana. When I moved on from the center, I started Interminable Rambling as a way to maintain a writing schedule.
Early in Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, Gerry Devlin asks Cushla to accompany him to a friend’s house in Belfast for a party. On their way to the house, they encounter a checkpoint manned by young British soldiers. The young soldiers, one of whose “complexion was cratered with acne scars and his mouth smelled of Juicy Fruit,” interrogate…
Near the end of Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast (2021), a coming-of-age story set at the start of The Troubles in Belfast, the nine-year-old protagonist Buddy talks with his grandfather at the hospital. During their conversation, Buddy tells his grandfather that his family may move “over the water” because his dad found work in England; however, his mom tells…
Whenever I teach an early American literature survey course, I know that most students didn’t choose to take the course because they wanted to read American literature before 1865. Most students took the course because it filled their general education requirement and fit the time slot that they wanted for a course. It’s as simple as…
Every year, as the spring semester comes to a close, I think about some of the things I have tried to teach students over the course of the semester and academic year. As a composition teacher, my main goal is to help students become better writers and readers, and hopefully, through that combination, become better…
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Interminable Rambling 