thanks for not being a zombie

Nice weekend: Gin and tonic. Backyard picnic table. Friends and kids. Tire swing. Starting to feel normal again after an academic year of rushing around.

This summer I'd like to get back in the gym. Less caffeine. More yoga. Better sleep. Maybe investigate that Buddhist temple that's not too far from my apartment.

Tonight I'm thinking about plans for summer. A part of the summer will be prepping for classes next year so that I can get more of my research done during the year while I'm teaching. In my head I'm already re-tooling my early British lit course for the fall and thinking about my eighteenth-century novel course. It will be interesting, I think, to configure my classes like games. I don't mean games in the "this is all fun and games" sense, but rather in the "here are the rules and here is how you can score points and let's enjoy this" sense. More on this as I think it through

In this vein, I gave this semester's students the option of playing Ivanhoe, an online literary game. Two of them took me up on the offer and took a stab at reworking Beowulf, but I think it takes more than two players for the game to be effective. They enjoyed it, though. Now that I have Movable Type set up, it will be a better environment for the game than the MSN Groups forum that we were using.

There are a few articles in various stages of development that I plan to complete and get out to the journals this summer.

I'm also making plans to travel to Maryland to take part in the English department's graduation ceremony. I received my Ph.D. last summer, but there are only ceremonies at the end of fall and spring semesters. So L and I will "graduate" at the same time, which was our plan all along.

While in Maryland I'll meet with some Romantic Circles folks to discuss (and do a bit of work on) the art gallery project we have in the works.

Air fare for my summer research trip to England still looks reasonable. I'm hesitating to commit to buying a ticket, and I'm not sure why. (I need to get on it before prices start going up.) A little bit of nervousness about arranging all the details, I suppose. I haven't traveled internationally since 1989, when I went to visit my parents in Belgium the year before they finally moved back to the states. I guess I feel a bit rusty. I need to re-contact the Methodist Archive Research Centre and make sure they're still okay with me coming. This will be a good trip, once I get over my mild performance anxiety.

As I wrote earlier, in July I'll be going to California for SHARP, and I'm very much looking forward to that.

It would be nice to keep my computing skills sharp: PHP, text-encoding, image editing, maybe learn some more-than-rudimentary Perl. Maybe put Linux on my laptop.

I'm fantasizing about writing grant applications this summer to support work on my book, another research trip, maybe an ambitious digitization project. Fingers crossed.

And somewhere in the midst of all of this, I'd like to visit family and friends, who are spread out in a variety of places: Georgia, New York, Texas. We'll see.

Posted by at 9:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by at 7:50 AM | Permalink

Is it accurate to call print an information technology?

I ask this question because my work concerns, among other things, the effects of print upon eighteenth-century Britain, and I'm uncertain if what is going on in this earlier period is part of the same historical narrative that includes the impact of the Internet, say, on contemporary life. I used to say yes, but now I'm not so confident.

Print presents information, but it doesn't process it or reprocess it in response to input from the user, which seems to be one of the defining characteristics of information technology.

I'm willing to argue about it. Can anyone refer me to a source that considers this question?

Posted by at 8:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

I sit in awe this morning of the interwoven discussion going on regarding truth in blogging. I started with this post on Jill's site, and then worked my way back and forth through various links. Not only is this a fascinating conversation, but it is a perfect demonstration of the power of linking and trackback.

I'm all too aware that my own blog entries have not been as carefully thought through or as dense with content as they could be. I'm torn, like everyone probably, between my desire to write in my blog and my need to take care things going on in my personal and professional life. Lately I've been leaning towards material life concerns and away from those of my online, electronic life.

Update: 7:45 p.m. - Here's what Samuel Johnson, writing in 1759, says about these issues:

The writer of his own life has at least the first qualification of an historian, the knowledge of the truth; and though it may be plausibly objected that his temptations to disguise it are equal to his opportunites of knowing it, yet I cannot but think that impartiality may be expected with equal confidence from him that relates the passages of his own life, as from him that delivers the transactions of another.

Certainty of knowledge not only excludes mistake but fortifies veracity. What we collect by conjecture, and by conjecture only can one man judge of another's motives or sentiments, is easily modified by fancy or by desire; as objects imperfectly discerned take forms from the hope or fear of the beholder. But that which is fully known cannot be falsified but with reluctance of understanding, and alarm of conscience; of understanding, the lover of truth; of conscience, the sentinel of virtue.  299

The Idler, Saturday, November 24, 1759. from Samuel Johnson: 1709-1784. ed. by Donald Greene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Posted by at 8:09 AM | Permalink

End User License Agreement: By reading this entry, you agree to respond with a witty comment.

• It's the end of the day on Friday, and perhaps I should be using my blog time to continue the conversation with Chuck about All the Real Girls, but instead I give you some goofy and unrelated thoughts. (More on All the Real Girls later.)



• In a little more than an hour I'll be eating yummy Ethiopian food on 39th Street with Jeff, Monique, and Sam to celebrate L's smashing dissertation defense.



• We're up to the last work of the semester in my Shakespeare class: The Tempest. I once saw a musical production of this play in Atlanta. Wait, it gets weirder. The part of King Alonso was played by the former (?) lead singer of the "classic rock" band Kansas. I'm not sure he knew he wasn't the main character.



• Today started off rainy and cool, which was nice because we've had dry weather ever since I moved here last summer. This afternoon, however, it's sunny and cool, which is not bad, either. I spent a little time today trying to add a feature to this page that would show you the current weather conditions in KC (because I know you're dying to keep up with that), but I couldn't get it to work.



• I never imagined myself living in Missouri. Iowa, Ohio, Illinois, New York, Florida, California, Alaska, Oregon, Washington, even Wyoming. Just not Missouri.



• The night before last, for the second time this semester, I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of gunfire in my neighborhood. At least this time no one was murdered.



• I work not far from a fairly large Frank Lloyd Wright building: the Kansas City Community Christian Church. Apparently, there are at least two other buildings by Wright in the city.



• When I was a little kid, I always wanted a surprise birthday party, but (Surprise!) I never got one. When I turned 16, however, my friend Doug threw one for me, and it was a complete success, one of the best birthdays I've ever had. This was in a small town in Belgium (which also doubled as the military headquarters for NATO, where both our dads worked). Twenty years later I move to Kansas City and Doug is working as an architect practically within walking distance of my office.

Posted by at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

FYI, faithful KC readers:

Anatomy of a Documentary in Action
a community forum on at-risk youth and arts collaboration
featuring visiting filmmaker Lexi Leban and the documentary Girl Trouble.

Friday, April 25, 10-11:30am
UMKC Belger Arts Center
2100 Walnut Street, KC MO

Women and girls are the fastest growing incarcerated population in the United States. Girl Trouble, a work-in-progress documentary, is an unflinching portrait of several at-risk young women in San Francisco struggling to get out of the system.

Anatomy of a Documentary in Action brings together the filmmaker with Kansas City artists, youth, educators, students, parents, professionals and non-profit organizations to explore the intersection between making art and creating change. Participants can record a video postcard to be sent to the girls in the documentary.

For more information contact: Daven Gee - 816/235-1708 - geed@umkc.edu
(Free parking is available in the lots across from the Center.)

Organized by UMKC Professor Daven Gee with support from the UMKC -Belger Arts Center for Creative Studies and assistance from UMKC Communication Studies Dept., UMKC Women's Center, UMKC Dept. of Sociology/Criminal Justice and Criminology, and the Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee.

Posted by at 8:39 AM | Permalink

I saw All the Real Girls the weekend before last. I enjoyed it a great deal, and it's stuck in my head for a while now. Chuck provides a thoughtful entry (as usual) on this film and finds in it a "nostalgia for a lost past that threatens to disappear irretrievably." [Blogspot's permanent links to individual entries seem to work only irregularly, so check out Chuck's main page if the above link doesn't work.]

Abandoned buildings, broken down cars, busted pianos -- images of materials that have outlived their usefulness seem to permeate this movie. The dreamlike music of artists like Will Oldham and Sparklehorse parallel the seemingly slow lives lived by the characters, who aren't ambitionless (or bored) so much as thoughtful and unhurried, if vaguely dissatisfied. Chuck writes

[J]obs have either dried up or the town's residents are forced to take work that dehumanizes them (Paul's mother for example works as a clown, and Noel works in a textile plant).

However, I'd like to argue against a negative reading of the advanced entropy evident in the town's surroundings, and the seemingly dead-end work that occupies the residents. The film seems to aestheticize the worn-out objects that we see rather than portray them as ugly or useless. And the characters seem to enjoy the time they spend -- somewhat aimlessly, perhaps -- trying to repair the old pianos, in the case of Paul's mother, or the cars, in the case of Paul and his friends. Granted, no one ever seems to actually get things back in working order, and their competence is called into question by the fact that Paul and his friends think putting moth balls in the gas tank is a sure way to rev up a car's performance.

But this doesn't seem to be the point. Like Paul driving the beat-up old station wagon slowly around the dirt race track while the hotrods race by him, no one is in a hurry, and the goal is not to be the first one over the finish line.

It's true that Paul's mother, who dresses up like a clown for children at the hospital, does not seem thrilled with her job. But the scene where she and a reluctantly clowned-up Paul dance for the children and get them to laugh and dance along with them is hypnotically compelling, with no soundtrack except for the quirky-sounding instrumental music playing. She may be a clown, but in this scene at least there is clearly meaningful work being done.

Posted by at 9:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If you've posted a question or comment and I haven't responded, it's not because I'm ignoring you. Today's my 12-hour day (or 14-hour, depending on how you figure it). I don't get out of class until almost 10 p.m. tonight. Then my mom is in town for the weekend, so I don't think I'll be very active online for a couple of days.

If you have any spare mojo lying around right now, you might vibe it my way today as I still have a little over 6 hours to go.

Posted by at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This week I'm rereading Samuel Richardson's blockbuster 1740 novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, and it's got me thinking about temporality. Pamela is an epistolary novel, a story told in letters, narrated by characters who don't know how the story is going to end. In their definitive biography of Richardson, T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel write that Richardson sought "to present events and emotions with the freshness and intensity only possible while they are still occurring or very recent" (98). Richardson called this "writing to the moment"; things happen to his characters, and almost immediately they are writing about them in their letters. They do not narrate a story from a temporal position months or years later, after they've had a chance to sort things out. This results, according to Eaves and Kimpel, in "a great gain in dramatic immediacy" (100).

Not everything reminds me of blogs, of course, but this does seem like an accurate description of blogging: "writing to the moment." As we write our blogs, which tend to have a biographical quality to them, we don't know how they are going to turn out. In what narrative do we imagine we're participating? How does the importance of previous events change as later events occur?A novelist writing an epistolary novel probably has some idea of how things are going to turn out, even if the characters don't, but an individual writing a blog doesn't. In that way, we're more like the characters than the novelist.

For example, I've been debating whether to write about the fact that I was turned down for the travel research grant I applied for. Let's say that five years from now my research is going very well, and I've succeeded with other grant applications. What will this rejection look like? Alternately, what if five years from now I've been turned down for application after application? This particular rejection will then look very different than in the first scenario.

I think to some extent you have to imagine yourself in the middle of a narrative that has a positive ending. "After a brief setback, I was finally able to..." or "Although this was disappointing, I soon learned that..." or "In the years before I was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant ..."

Eaves, T. C. Duncan, and Ben D. Kimpel. Samuel Richardson: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

Posted by at 8:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, it appears that Brandon Barr now owns more of my blog than I do. If this were real stock, he'd have a controlling interest. Does this mean that in place of my usual spastic entries on how I stumble through my professional and intellectual life we will now see eloquent ruminations on digital poetics and culture here as well as on Brandon's site? Only time will tell.

Posted by at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I got turned on to blogshares via Jill Walker's entry on the subject. Jill quotes Phil Ringnalda describing the system as a "surprisingly good model," one that will ecourage people to buy shares in inexpensive, because unread, blogs and then link to them in order to get their value to go up. As a result, formerly unread blogs gain more incoming links and gain more readers.

But here's a potential kink: if users recognize that shares in your blog can be bought for little or nothing, then they are likely to buy a large number of shares. For example, I had bought 1,000 shares in andedam.org, which made me one of only five investors. The value of the blog will only go up if many people provide incoming links, but if only five of us link to the blog because of our self-interest, the value is not likely to go up very much. So I sold 900 shares of andedam.org in the hopes of attracting additional investors, which will ideally provide more links and thus more readers. All of my blog's shares are sold, and it currently only has four investors, and as far as I can tell, only one of them actually links to me.

Furthermore, the blogshares bot that calculates how many incoming links your blog seems to be faulty. It claims there is only one incoming link to my blog, when I know there are at least four. This will, perhaps, eventually be worked out.

It doesn't look like Phil's prediction is quite coming true, yet. This raises an interesting question. Will blogshares institute some kind of artificial limit on the number shares one can own in an individual stock? Perhaps a limit on the number of shares you can buy at once, as this thread suggests? Or will the system instead be a model in which success requires moderation and generosity through self-discipline? In other words, if you're motivated by greed -- you want the blogs in which you own shares to rise in value -- you must not be too greedy -- if you buy up all the shares in a given blog, that blog is unlikely to rise in value. A diversity of investors is best: you have to share the wealth to make wealth.

Chuck suggests that "the arbitrariness of Blogshares points toward the more damaging arbitrariness of the NYSE and other stock markets that are based on the investment of 'real' money," but this could be one significant difference.

Posted by at 6:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I tend to find blog entries about blogging a bit too self-referential. Well, at least mine are. However, I thought I'd post a quick entry concerning Blogshares, which is "a fantasy stock market for blogs." A number of people have written about it already, and I don't have anything particularly scintillating to add. However, I'd like to draw your attention to my blog's listing, and invite you to buy some stock. It's a steal!

You can read the Blogshares faq for yourself to see how it works. Here are a few quick observations on my part:

• The rules state that your blog must reach a valuation of $1,000 before it will go public. My blog is only valued at around $17, but it went public anyway. I half-thought this meant that I was special in some way, that perhaps someone recognized the obvious genius of my postings and decided, "Damn the rules! This simply must be listed publicly!" It turns out that there was just a bug in the system. Humility can be a good thing.
• My friend Chuck bought 400 shares of my blog, which makes sense because he's one of the 4 or 5 of you who appear to actually read my site. But then this afternoon I noticed that a user named Empty Pages, who owns a blog by the same name had bought 200 shares. Strangers are buying up my blog! What does this mean?
• The links you create to other blogs from your homepage have value. My links are currently worth around $29. If I link to you, and blogshares tracks that link, then the value of your blog goes up by $29. I really don't know what to make of this. If my blog's only worth $17, then why is the link worth $29? The quantification {and commodification} of my importance in the blogosphere is as puzzling as the price of gas in the "real" world. I suspect, though, that if I were to read the rules a bit more carefully, things would make more sense to me. Update. This just in: reading the directions can prove to be a simple yet effective way to make sense of things. This explains how the link value is calculated: ($100 + Value of Blog) / (Total number of outgoing links). My blog is valued at $17.30. Add $100. Divide by 4, which is how many outgoing links blogshares think I have. The result? $29.35.

Oh, and I've added a list of blogshare blogs in the righthand column of the page. Some of these are blogs I read regularly. Some aren't. {Hint: I don't read Norwegian.} I bought ones I thought might be good investments in addition to ones that I like to read. Sometimes these two things coincide.

Posted by at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Civic minded entry this morning -- Kansas City Star, KC to turn on fountains for another season today: Kansas City, they say, has more fountains than any other city in the world except Rome. Today's the day they turn them all on.

Posted by at 6:19 AM | Permalink

As I work this afternoon, I'm listening to free mp3s from the Protest Records website created by Thurston Moore and Chris Habib. The site contains dozens of tracks, and I've downloaded nine, tracks that range from sound collages ("Total War," "The Body is a System") to '60's style folk tunes ("Go Down, Congress", "Rogue State") to hip-hop ("In a World Gone Mad") to indie rock (Cat Power's sublime tracks "Maybe Not" & "Rockets").

I think you should go to the site and download the Scott Amendola Band cover of Bob Dylan's "Masters of War."

I think you should do this right now.

Posted by at 3:15 PM | Permalink

Love in Excess (1719/1720), by Eliza Haywood, was one of the four best-selling novels in England during the first half of the eighteenth-century:

A while their lips were cemented! rivetted together with kisses, such kisses! as collecting every sence in one, exhale the very soul, and mingle spirits! Breathless with bliss, then would they pause and gaze, then joyn again, with ardour still encreasing, and looks, and sighs, and straining grasps were all the eloquence that either could make use of.

Possible reader responses:

1. Hee-hee!
2. No wonder the emerging genre of the novel was viewed with such suspicion at this time.

Posted by at 5:24 PM | Permalink

Exam day. Last 5 minutes of class. Finished the task I had set for myself while students take the test, so I thought I'd write an entry on my Palm. This is not moblogging, I assume, because I'm not posting from a portable device, just composinq. Will sync & post later from my laptop in the office. What do you call this?

Posted by at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Posted by at 4:04 PM | Permalink

In my early British literature course, students are responsible for group presentations. Today was our last day discussing Paradise Lost, and the students decided to stage an O'Reilly Factor panel discussion featuring Satan and Adam as panelists. The only thing I know about this show is from the spoofs of it that have appeared on Saturday Night Live, but I can say that the presentation was easily one of the best all semester, in part because the format allowed them to emphasize that at the heart of Milton's epic is a question: who's to blame for why the world is in such a sorry state?

O'Reilly set the stage for the debate, and then asked pointed questions of both characters. When Satan would try to weasel out of his responsibility for the fall, O'Reilly would remind him that this was the "No Spin Zone." Other students in the class then took on the role of "callers" to the show, asking questions of the panelists. It went very well.

I'm currently wrestling with my conception and organization of this class. I'll be teaching it again in the fall, and I'm trying to decide how much of class discussion needs to be close and careful analysis of key passages and how much needs to be broader discussion of larger, more abstract issues raised by the readings or of the cultural context in which the readings were first created. Careful analysis can be useful when students are working just to understand what's going on in a text (e.g. Canterbury Tales in the original middle English), but it can also get boring at times. Broader discussions are often more interesting, but then we run the risk of making generalizations that are difficult to support in the text, or are difficult to support historically. I'm enough of a New Historicist to cringe at statements that begin, "During the Renaissance...", but I have to get better at providing a rich grounding in cultural context. I take my students from Beowful to Gulliver's Travels, and there is already so much to read that I'm not sure how to add critical or historical readings. Maybe I should just do it, expect more of them, and see what happens.

Another wrinkle: next year this course changes from 211 to 317, spurring me to ramp up my expectations of my students.

I'd be interested in hearing how others who teach literature (broadly conceived)

• frame the readings (viewings/browsings) for the class,
• focus (or not) on what might be called close reading skills,
• expect their students to make connections between cultural context and text,
• teach their students the critical skills necessary for complex and satisfying reading.

Posted by at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)