Welcome!
This is Jim's Web Site

Don't hesitate to send along comments, questions, thoughts on Irish music or the meaning of life.

My most recent book, On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching, was published in May of 2008 by Harvard University Press. Click LEARN MORE below for a link to the book.

On this website you'll find links to my regular column for the Chronicle of Higher Education, information about speaking and media appearances, and a very occasional blog about what's happening with me.

Enjoy. [LEARN MORE]

Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons from the First Year
Available from Johns Hopkins University Press

Back Cover Text: In this fast-paced and lively account, Jim Lang asks the questions that confront every new faculty member: Will my students like me? Will my teaching schedule allow me time to do research and write? Is anyone still awake in the back row?

Lang shares his moments of confustion, frustration, even elation--as well as his insights into the lives and working conditions of faculty in higher education today. Engaging and accessible, Life on the Tenure Track will delight and enlighten faculty, graduate students, and administrators alike. [LEARN MORE] [BUY NOW]

Learning Sickness: A Year with Crohn's Disease
Now available from Capital Books

Back Cover Text: Diagnosed with Crohn's disease in 1996, James M. Lang spent five years trying to ignore the disease and its effects on his body and his life. In August of 2000, he began a year-long struggle with the disease, which included a week in the hospital in February of 2001. By August of 2001 he had returned to health with the help of a new medication. 'Learning Sickness' chronicles the author's battles with the disease, with doctors, with family and friends, and with the painful realization that he had to learn to live with a chronically diseased body. The book combines narratives of the author's daily life with reflections upon the nature of disease and medicine, upon the lessons we can take from illness in the human condition, and upon what it means to live with a physical self. [LEARN MORE] [BUY NOW]

News/Blog
July 12, 2010

I have not blogged since last year, so I continue my torrid pace of one or two blogs per year. Here is a brief update.

I had a busy year directing the Honors Program at Assumption College, but also a really excellent year. I enjoyed the opportunity to work with Assumption's best students, and am looking forward to two more years of directing the program. I should have one more year after that until my next sabbatical, so I will either retire back into my regular teaching role for a year or take one extra year as Director, depending upon what the administration wants.

At the end of the year, the day after I had turned in my grades, I started having unexplained chest pains. After a few days of this, and a racing heartbeat, I finally went to the ER and spent a night in the hospital getting my heart tested for everything under the sun. In the end, they said it was stress or anxiety. Subsequently, I have diagnosed myself as having experienced a severe episode of the 'Turning 40's'--a very sudden awareness of my own mortality. Why it happened at that particular moment I have no idea.

I'm grateful for it now, though, because it prompted a pretty wholesale analysis of my life and priorities, as well as the discovery of a writer who has had a pretty major influence on my thinking: Anthony de Mello, an Indian Jesuit who writes about seeking awareness and balance in your life. I'm trying all kind of new things for me, like meditating, and they have all been welcome changes. I have also begun running and bicycling, adding to my usual swimming, and am enjoying all of that immensely.

So I'm feeling pretty charged these days, spiritually and emotionally, and all thanks to my pretend heart attack.

It has also prompted a new writing project, the first one I have begun in quite some time now. I am very excited about it, and am working diligently away at it this summer.

The summer travel season is about to begin for the Langs, so I will be in and out for the next month or so.

Not that you'll be checking back in on a daily basis for my next blog or anything. Visit again in December and you might find a new one then.

Musically, Hat On, Drinking Wine's second CD, (which contains four songs that I wrote) will be ready in August. Two CDs that I have discovered in the last couple of months, and am listening to obsessively, are Pink Floyd's 'The Final Cut' (I know, I'm about thirty years behind), and Steve Martin's 'The Crow.' Martin is an excellent banjo player and can really write as well. My wife bought me a banjo for Christmas and I have just started learning how to play it. Lots of fun.

So for the next six weeks I will be playing my banjo and enjoying the summer. I hope you do the same.

Jim

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Hat On, Drinking Wine's Debut CD
Review from the Worcester Telegram and Gazette

Tracks
by Craig Semon
Worcester Telegram and Gazette June 11, 2009

Whether feeling the weight of a slowly sinking sunset, frozen in one’s tracks by a snapshot or drowning beneath the summer rain, Hat On, Drinking Wine’s members seem to have their share of girl troubles on record, but don’t have any problems expressing their feelings through words and music.

With an aptly chosen moniker lifted from Van Morrison’s “Madame George,” Hat on, Drinking Wine follows the singer-songwriter tradition by putting plenty of passion and poetry into their refreshingly honest and emotionally resonant songs. Whether it’s the conversational, confessional lyrics, the intimate, bare-bones vocals or the homespun and hands-on arrangements; intimacy and honesty are two qualities that are very important to this three-year-old, Worcester-based rock ’n’ roots combo.

Citing influences including Wilco, Counting Crows, Van Morrison, the Band and Bob Dylan, Hat On, Drinking Wine’s seven-track, self-titled debut features tunes from the band’s three songwriters (pianist, accordion and tin whistle player Jim Lang and guitarists Matt Robert and Ed Whalen) and two lead singers (Robert and Whalen). And, despite all having distinct voices, these great storytellers and musicians combine forces for a cohesive unit.

Lang and Robert, both English teachers (at Assumption College and Doherty High School, respectively — it shows), and drummer Jarrett Conner (the city of Worcester budget director) all live on the same block on Franconia Street, near Newton Square, while Whalen, a math teacher at Doherty, grew up just around the corner on Monroe. Jared Forgues, the band’s new bassist (who’s not on the disc), hails from Leominster. West Boylston wunderkind Roger Lavallee produced and plays bass on the record.

Worcester’s answer to Wilco will have a CD release party Friday at Nick’s Bar & Restaurant, 124 Millbury St., Worcester.

Whalen musters up his inner-Adam Duritz on the confident and compelling, heart-on-one’s-sleeve rocker, “Mr. Jefferson.” The naturally flowing, neo-hippie words of wisdom unfold atop a warm bed of chimey acoustic guitar strums, trash-can percussion and sparse piano before reaching a jam-enriched crescendo. Besides being a song that the Counting Crows would probably kill for, “Mr. Jefferson” is a song that makes you hungry for more.

On the rootsy, barroom boogie, “Back to Boston,” Robert relives one of those perfect, spontaneous evenings that despite so many factors working against him, somehow falls into place. Trying to possess an unattainable free-spirit that has left an indelible impression on his romantic psyche, Robert howls, “She has everything I need as she spirals out of sight.”

Every picture tells a story, sometimes one too painful to bear, as is the case of the Lang-penned original, “Pictures of Your Exhibition.” Unfolding with great, storytelling skills and strikingly vivid details, Whalen examines photographic evidence (courtesy of the protagonist’s ex-shutterbug squeeze) and retraces his role in the failed romance that has left “a rainy glaze over everything.”

“I’m not good at much of anything these days since I left you,” Whalen confesses on “House on Lee Street.” While this ringing sentiment might be true on paper, in reality he couldn’t be more wrong. Through bare-bones intimacy and natural flowing lyrics, Whalen captures those hard-to-describe emotions in which unresolved feelings and lingering regret lives, mutates and festers in our subconsciousness.

On “Smoke Rings,” Robert is smitten by a chain-smoking, Beatles-strumming, bed-tossing, free-spirit who is “gonna make the world better one fingernail at a time.” Not only is the Robert-Whalen composition a riveting character study, it’s a solid rocker. Robert urges, “She says, ‘Take me away,’ ’cause she knows that she’s worth it.” And singer and the song’s rock ’n’ roll heroine are both right. By song’s end, she, too, will be blowing smoke rings around the listener’s heart.

While Robert and Whalen take turns serenading a female bar patron on the Irish pub-inspired closer “Jackie,” it’s Lang who truly shines. Not only did the multi-instrumentalist pen this infectious ditty; his honky-tonk piano playing, accordion flourishes and tin whistle trappings make it another lively and dynamic showcase for this promising band to watch, and a better one to listen to live.

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