thanks for not being a zombie

I wrote an early post in the life of this blog about trying to come to terms with my blogging identity (and my newly acquired professorial identity), still feeling the twinges of the transition from graduate student to professor. Things feel more settled now, but I'm still thinking. Today's entry by Elouise on "virtual fraternization" prompts me to wonder if any students of mine (ir)regularly read my blog. Conversely, do any of them keep blogs that I don't know about? If you're out there, speak up. That's what the comments are for. A student from last semester mentioned in an email that he'd read my blog, but he hasn't commented. A couple of colleagues have mentioned coming across it, but no comments.

Well, Heidi has a blog, and she's a student at UMKC, where I teach. We read each other's blog, but we've never met. Jenny took my "Introduction to Humanities Computing" course at the University of Maryland (I wrote about it when I found her blog, and she commented on the entry). And Eric took my "Print, Literature, and Social Transformations in Eighteenth-Century England," also at UMD. I was a grad student when I taught both classes, however, so is it more accurate to describe them as former students or as fellow students? Or both? Eric and I were also coworkers at MITH. The boundaries are not so clear, and they never have been.

A famous cartoon says that, online, nobody knows you're a dog. But you and I both know that sooner or later you're gonna start woofing and give yourself away.

Flying back from New York at Christmas, sitting in the airport bar, I see a UMKC student, one I don't yet know too well, though she later takes my spring graduate seminar. What are the odds? I don't go up and talk to her because ... well, I don't know. I feel like a dork; she's got tattoos and sits with hip-looking friends. I'm also sort of hungover and not feeling my best.

In April, I blog about my intent to investigate the Buddhist temple in my neighborhood. Well, mid-summer I do, and who do I run into there but one of my students from spring semester, both of us now sitting in on a class on Buddhism. From professor-student to student-student again.

I discover that a student from my Milton class works at a local video store. I peruse his picks in the "staff recommendation" section. We talk over the counter about an exhibit at a local museum.

I attend the UMKC spring graduation ceremony, sitting with grad students because I've been asked to lead them where they're supposed to go (as if I know). When the speaker asks the faculty to stand up, I look around blankly until one of the students nudges me and says, "That's you." Oh. Right. Two weeks later, or so, I attend the UMD graduation ceremony where my dissertation advisor has generous things to say about my work as his student. I seem to be a character in a novel that's doing confusing things with time. Student? Professor?

But I don't know if anyone here keeps their own blog. And people are often more candid in their blog than they are online. And people often don't know their readers through venues other than their blog. And as CNWB acknowledges, many of us write blogs as an outlet to say things we otherwise feel we can't say, even to our friends: "I wouldn't want to subject them to my uninhibited ramblings, just as I wouldn't bail them up in real life and crap on about the things I discuss here. The greatness of blogging is that if people want to listen to me, they'll come, and I don't have to worry about boring anyone."

I haven't explicitly promoted my blog to my non-blogging acquaintances. It came up at a party, and since then, some of them have found it, most haven't looked (or if they have, they didn't mention it). But if you google "george h williams", guess what the number one hit is? Sooner or later, people are gonna notice, right? And some (many?) of those people are gonna be students. What then? I'm not too worried, frankly, but maybe I should be ... ?

Posted by at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This was a story in Britain this summer and I just forgot to blog about it. Now here it is stateside in the New York Times. A growing revenue stream for the music industry is the downloadable ringtone of popular songs for cellphones: sales of $16.6 million in 2002, and $50 million predicted for 2003. And while synthesized versions only put money in songwriters' pockets, ringtones that are snippets from the actual recordings spread the wealth to musicians and singers, too. And a few songs have made more money as a ringtone than as an honest-to-goodness, played-on-the-radio, bought-in-the-music-store song.

And here's the money shot:

The ring-tone business offers many attractions for the labels. Unlike CD's and digital music files, ring tones can be bought anywhere at any time by someone whose cellphone has the software and hardware for music. The cost is added to the user's monthly bill. In addition, most cellphone networks are controlled by the carriers that own them, allowing them to be monitored in a way that is impossible on the Web. Some people in the music industry see a not-so-distant future when teenagers will pay a few dollars to download full songs onto their phones or other wireless devices ... Companies have sprouted up to act as liaisons between the music owners and the phone-service carriers.

The future of legal digital music just keeps looking bleaker and bleaker. Let's break this down, shall we?

• Monitoring and control of the cellphone network so that what you store and play on your device is always under surveillance? Nice. Where do I sign up?
• Teenagers will pay a few dollars to download a full song? When a CD usually costs less than $15 for at least ten tracks and often more? I can't imagine why any consumer would balk at such a scheme.
• And yet another layer of administration has cropped up to act as liason between music labels and phone companies? So is any of the money we pay for music going to people who actually make music?

The music industry is now claiming a decline in music sales of 26% over the last four years, according to the article, although in PBS NewsHour q&a from June, Matt Oppenheim of the RIAA claims much more modest figures. The industry has never been good with numbers (or they've been very good, depending on how you look at it). Musicians have historically been given the short end of the stick when it comes to the profits arising from the sale of their music through the industry, and the ability to fudge numbers has had great benefits to the business.

The industry claims that this decline is "[b]ecause of factors like unauthorized music swapping," in the language of the Times article, which is a weird construction. How many factors "like unauthorized music swapping" could there be? In other words, how many are the result of consumer behavior versus other factors? Consider that

1. The whole economy has been in the toilet for much of the last four years. Why should the music industry expect to be exempt? Or maybe the problem of online file sharing is worse than we thought. (New car sales are down because of unauthorized music swapping. Unemployment is up because of unauthorized music swapping.)
2. The music industry just doesn't try that hard to produce good music.

To expand on point 2: I'm a fan of popular music (look, I may quote the Replacements to bolster my indie cred, but I also love songs like Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful" or Mary J. Blige's "No More Drama" even as I recognize that they are emotionally manipulative and more than a little cliché), but even I have my limits. There are far too many insipid songs (rock, hip hop, r&b, and especially the god-awful crap that passes for country music on commercial radio) that the music industry spends literally millions of dollars producing and promoting, way more money than they spend paying people who actually write the music and perform it. That's why they have a problem: their music just isn't very good. And I think they know it, or else they wouldn't spend so much money to cram it down our throats.

The solution? Is it to get back to basics, to try to encourage creative people to make interesting and innovative music, to take advantage of new technologies to streamline the production and distribution process so that it's less expensive, thus putting more money into the pockets of the people who deserve it, to create a fair and equitable process by which artists are remunerated for their work?

Yeah, we could try that but.... oooooh, cell phones!

Posted by at 10:30 AM | Permalink

Everybody at your party
They don't look depressed
And everybody's dressin' funny
Color me impressed

-Replacements

Posted by at 12:03 AM | Permalink

As Elouise has just posted while I write this entry, it seems that what started as relatively innocent thoughts on blogs by Elouize and Liz (as well as a comment by Chuck in Elouise's blog) have led to some rather heatedly sarcastic comments by others in the blogosphere. I believe this all started, believe it or not, more than two weeks ago with some thoughts by Elouise that led into a discussion about blogging and identity that pinged around the Word Herders and others for awhile through what I've been calling the "identity thread" (most recently here). The most recent responses have been puzzling.

I think you reveal a great deal about yourself in the way that you respond to what other people have to say. You might think you're really getting in a good zinger when in reality others are watching you quizzically, wondering what the hell happened in your past to cause you to carry around such bitterness. And if you ignore all of the detailed and nuanced posts that have taken place over the last 18 days in order to pounce on the one that allows you to get your digs in, well, don't be surprised if people don't take you seriously.

The accusation (paraphrased): You're elitist because you don't want what you have to say on this subject to be linked to who you are. The accuser: a person who posts under a pseudonym.

Mr. Kettle? There's a Mr. Pot on the phone for you.

Hmmm. Does that sound bitter on my part? What does that reveal about me?

Posted by at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

For a while in my youth I was a huge fan of the band Blue Öyster Cult. Tonight, driving home from working late on an article that will go in the mail tomorrow, I heard their mid-'70s hit "Don't Fear the Reaper," and I thought to myself, "Where did this song come from?" I mean, it's a really good song, both lyrically and musically, far and away better than anything else the band ever recorded, although one might argue that some of the material on the album Fire of Unknown Origin comes close provided one had a taste for that sort of thing. I just learned from the above Allmusic links above that Patti Smith collaborated with them on some of their music. Wow.

Yes, basically this is cheese rock, but ... those vague lyrics at once both menacing and seductive. It sounds like a love song but the persona of one of the singers (lyrics on the left) is clearly Death, with the other singer (lyrics on the right) offering encouragment to the would-be lover:

Come on baby... Don't fear the Reaper
Baby take my hand... Don't fear the Reaper
We'll be able to fly... Don't fear the Reaper
Baby I'm your man...

Then there's a third persona, a narrator, whom we see in this last verse:

Come on baby... And she had no fear
And she ran to him... Then they started to fly
They looked backward and said goodbye
She had become like they are
She had taken his hand
She had become like they are

Good lord, but that's brilliantly creepy!

Posted by at 10:52 PM | Permalink

Brothers and sisters, we are getting rain in Kansas City. This might not seem like much to you folks from other parts of the world where water has been falling from the sky this summer, but around here we've been experiencing a drought and heatwave of seemingly biblical proportions. Update: This may be obvious, but that is a static image to the left, not a live feed from weather.com.

Posted by at 7:05 PM | Permalink

Reading Scanning the diary (published regularly during his lifetime) of John Wesley (1703-1791) this afternoon, looking for a quote to which I have misplaced the proper citation. Came across this interesting entry for Thursday, October 26, 1786:

In the evening, I preached to a large and serious congregation at Wandsworth. I think it was about two in the morning that a dog began howling under our window in a most uncommon manner. We could not stop him by any means. Just then William Barker died.

Not what I was looking for, but interesting nonetheless.

Posted by at 3:09 PM | Permalink

From this morning's Washington Post: "Halliburton's Deals Greater Than Thought":

Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, has won contracts worth more than $1.7 billion under Operation Iraqi Freedom and stands to make hundreds of millions more dollars under a no-bid contract awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according to newly available documents.

The spokesperson for Halliburton is quoted as saying that calling this war profiteering is "an affront to all hard-working, honorable Halliburton employees."

Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, is said to have liked this riddle:

How many legs does a donkey have if you call his tail a leg?

I don't know, Mr. President. I guess five.

Wrong. Even if you call the tail a leg, it's still a just a tail.

I'll repeat my earlier suggestion for the United Nations: pass a resolution that says that any country that wages war on another country is required by international law to pay for the rebuilding, but make it illegal for any corporation from the aggressor nation to receive a contract to take part in, or profit in any way from, the rebuilding.

Posted by at 7:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, aren't they all?

I'm prepping for teaching Beowulf (the Seamus Heaney translation) in one class tomorrow and Fantomina in the other. Depending on whom you believe, a thousand years or so separate these texts.

But I'm tempted with other readings, having learned from Edith that there is a Bonny 'Prince' Billy tour diary that's pretty blog-like and from Grumpy Girl (scroll down, if necessary; no permalinks in this blogspot, I think) that Harvey freakin' Pekar has a blog.

The issues chewed over in the identity thread keep coming up, don't they? Is that Bonny 'Prince' Billy's blog or is it Will Oldham's? Do I refer to "Grumpy Girl" or "Meredith"?

Edith, who records for Drag City, like Oldham, er, Billy, er, you know what I mean, writes

Being very blog-aware I can't help but compare his and my writing styles. If I were an outsider I think I'd prefer reading his blog over my own, but I'm not an outsider and who wants to read their own writing?

I like reading both of their blogs, but one thing I like about Edith's is that she comes across as a real person while the Bonny 'Prince' Billy blog feels more like a performance. But as Ryan astutely points out, just about everything could be said to be a performance, even the the behavior of "real people." I also like the fact that I can comment on and trackback to her blog while the BPB blog (and the Pekar blogs) are impenetrable by such interlinking. You can email BPB, but that's not the same thing.

And just to wrap this entry up with a neat little bow: Fantomina is a 1724 novella by Eliza Haywood about a young woman who adopts a variety of different identities in order to maintain the romantic interest of the clueless and fickle man she has fallen for. At one point, he cheats on one of her identities with another of her identities. That Haywood was something else.

Posted by at 9:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

DNA is the astronaut, and you are the spacesuit.

Posted by at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Fall semester began today. (You have to imagine the title of this post as it would be pronounced by Sean Connery.) Nothing major to report, other than today happened to be the day they replaced the windows in my office, meaning I spent some time sitting outside in triple-digit heat preparing for class and then eating my lunch. Nice to have new windows, though.

Now I'll begin to think differently about what I say on here as the very real possibility arises that students will google me and find this blog. Well, I guess it's no more real than it was in the spring, when I started blogging. However, my Google ranking has improved considerably since that time. To be honest, though, I'm not sure my in-class persona is that different from my blog persona, but I'm probably not the best person to ask about that.

Listening to the new Cat Power CD tonight, You Are Free. Very good stuff. You can download a (free and legal) mp3 of one of the tracks: "Maybe Not," hosted on the Sonic Youth server as part of Thurston Moore's Protest Records project.

Back to reading Eliza Haywood's Fantomina.

Posted by at 8:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Via a discussion on Slashdot: The San Francisco based Distributed Library Project.

Create an account, then list the books and videos that you own. You will then have access to the multitude of books and videos available in other people's collections. You can search for specific authors or titles, browse individual collections, find nearby users, or find people who like books in common with yours. You will have access to user-written reviews and have the opportunity to write your own.

If the owner of a book or video you're interested in has time for you to pick it up, you can check out items for a 2, 7, 14, or 30 day period (at the owner's discretion). Returning books late will get you negative feedback, while returning books promptly will get you positive feedback. You are never under any obligation to lend an item if you don't feel comfortable doing so.

Sounds very interesting, but I think the creator is off the mark when he writes, "the traditional library system doesn't do much to foster community" and "if you try to talk with someone holding a book you like - you'll probably get shushed." Only someone who has not spent much time in bricks-and-mortar libraries lately would write this. Most libraries of any size regularly sponsor lectures and classes at which patrons get to know each other, and conversations between patrons happen regularly. The old stereotype of the library as a placed where people "get shushed" simply doesn't hold water.

There is exigence for the Distributed Library Project, however, and it's the fact that public library budgets are getting slashed. If one could borrow books from other readers, the problems created by limited public funds (and the resulting limited collections) would be ameliorated somewhat. My hope, however, is that the success of a project like this would not lead to regularly lowered funding of libraries.

And another thought: I wonder how the DLP would stand up to a legal challenge from corporate publishing entitities arguing that it is an illegal analog file-sharing system. Yes, this would be a ridiculous argument, but when it comes to copyright and capitalism, anything seems possible lately.

Posted by at 9:20 AM | Permalink

Via V+: A group fotolog of the blackout of 2003.

Posted by at 9:31 PM | Permalink

In a recent entry I gave props to OpenOffice, and talked about the ease with which one can produce PDFs with the latest version. Well, today I finished my syllabi and exported each of them as PDFs: English 317: Introduction to British Literature I and English 350: The Eighteenth-Century Novel. Seems to work pretty well, but I don't know why the file sizes are so honking big.

Posted by at 7:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Via Waxy.org: John Walker describes how he accidentally created the first virus in 1975. And in 1982, Richard Skrenta, Jr. created the first virus for microcomputers. What I like about Skrenta's Elk Cloner is the fact that its goal is to display a little poem:

        It will get on all your disks
          It will infiltrate your chips
            Yes it's Cloner!

        It will stick to you like glue
          It will modify ram too
            Send in the Cloner!

While the meter may not scan just right, I have to ask why more viruses don't have a literary payoff like this.

Posted by at 5:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As I write this entry for the "blogging my trip to georgia" thread, I'm aware that there is another thread taking place here and on other blogs, and it's a thread that started much earlier than my participation in it, and I realize that I've not really responded to ("participated in"?) the much earlier posts from, for example, Chuck, but I'd really like to finish the Georgia thread right now, and I only have so much time tonight.

Starting backwards. On Friday morning (August 8), Chuck did me the huge favor of getting up at around 6:00 a.m., which is like the middle of the night for him, to drive me to the MARTA station, where I could catch a train to the airport. Atlanta gets this part of its transportation system right: the subway goes right to the airport. No catching a bus, a cab, a taxi, or a light rail train to the subway. Just pay your $1.75 and go. Delta, which is Atlanta based, even has self-serve check-in kiosks right inside the MARTA station, so before you even enter the actual airport, you will have checked your luggage and printed out your own boarding pass. The actual flight home was uneventful. I was in KC by 9:30 a.m. What did I do with my day? I slept. Too much excitement on the trip.

Thursday I spent looking at mostly manuscript material in the Special Collections at Emory's Robert W. Woodruff library. As I mentioned earlier, the papers that held my interest the most were those of Augustus Toplady.

Being on Emory's campus was a strange experience and here's why: Emory is a leafy green private university. I did not ever attend Emory University. As a BA and MA student, I attended Georgia State University, Atlanta's urban public institution of higher learning. While a student, I worked part-time at the Kinko's across the street from Emory, so my only interaction with faculty and students there was in a service position. How different, then, to be the one with the Ph.D. receiving deference and assistance from university staff in the libraries.

I had a moment of connection on two different days with young women working at a local coffee place when I talked about having worked in a similar job. "Coffee shop", "copy shop": they even sort of sound alike. Neither of them were Emory students, though they were college students, and both of them seemed to feel the same sense of outsider wariness with regard to the Emory community that I had felt. When one of them learned that I was now a professor of English (she asked), she wrinkled her brow and said, "Really?" Now what did that mean? Do I look too young? Too dumb? Too hip? (Yeah, right.)

As with Chuck, S took me on an excellent, personalized tour of the Michael C. Carlos Museum's special exhibit on Ramesses I.

That night Chuck and I picked up a pizza from Athens Pizza, and then later Mike took us to Waffle House for a slice of pie. In some ways, hanging out was fun like it used to be back in the early '90s when we were all MA students together at Georgia State, but in other ways things will never be the same in that our lives have changed such that we have more to worry about than we used to. Worrying about publications, about landing a good job (note to any UMKC readers: I consider what I have a good job), about tenure, about relationships, about children, about parents. Maybe worry isn't the right word. And maybe for Chuck and Mike being together feels the same as it always has. For some reason I sometimes experience surprise at finding myself in the middle of an adult life. How did this happen?

I wrote earlier about daytime activities on Wednesday. That evening, Chuck, S, and I headed north of town for dinner with Mike, Jenna and their two children. I hadn't seen the kids in about two years, and of course they are much bigger and much more language-y than they were when last I saw them. I have no desire for kids of my own, but it sure is fun to spend time with someone else's.

Here was an interesting moment: while we were playing, I picked up the older of the two and put her on top of a tall box. Her reaction was, "How am I going to get down?" Ah, a pragmatist. Her younger brother's reaction to the same thing when it was his turn was, "Hee-heee!" A free spirit. Of course, he saw his older sister come down with no problem, so he had the benefit of empirical observation, not just theoretical speculation.

I had a very good conversation with Mike as we washed dishes while the other grown-ups put the kids to bed. It sometimes feels that moments of true connection come too infrequently and at unusual times. But at least they come.

Especially interesting was all my time with Chuck because back in the day, before the grad school diaspora, when there was Chuck, there was Jim, and Jim talks. A lot. (I can speak of Jim with impudence impunity because he never reads my blog.) So I appreciated the opportunity to have the conversations that we did.

How does one conclude an entry you've written in reverse chronological order? Maybe you just stop.

Posted by at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

If you don't know about OpenOffice already, you should do yourself a favor and check it out. It's a suite of office productivity tools (based on Sun Microsystems' StarOffice) that rivals what Bill Gates' flying monkeys are churning out.

Oh, except it's free.

It runs on Solaris, Windows, and Linux. Now, if it runs on Linux, does that mean it runs on Apple's OS X? One nifty feature of the latest version of their word processor is that you can export as PDF. The whole enchilada is downloadable from the web, but it's a 50-megabyte download so you might want to make a sandwich or something while you wait.

Posted by at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I got to Chuck's the evening of Tuesday, August 5, and we promptly walked across the street to a Mexican place for dinner and a pitcher of margaritas. Say what you will about Atlanta, you can be sure to get good Mexican food and good pizza there. I feel some satisfaction that on each of my trips this summer (Georgia, England, and California), I was able to meet up with a local blogger. I met S later that night, and we made plans to meet up the next afternoon on campus to carpool back to Chuck's and then head on to Mike's for dinner with J and the young ones.

Chuck is more of a night owl, while I like to crash and then get up early and get going, so on Wednesday morning I was off on foot around 7:30 to Emory's Pitts Theology Library to take a look at their copy of the microfiche collection "The People Called Methodists" (detailed PDF description available online from the publisher).

While in the library, I fell madly in love with the Minolta MS 6000. I don't care what the law says, if loving a high-quality, cost-effective microform reader that lets you view images from any media format on screen, as well as make clear, crisp laser prints on a stand-alone laser printer or scan images directly into a computer at resolutions of up to 800 dpi with an optional 256-level grayscale kit is wrong, then I don't want to be right. Just between you and me, Pitts Theology Library does not charge for photocopying from the microform materials. I'm not going to say I made a lot of copies, but if you hear of Emory University having financial troubles ... Well, I've said too much.

More later.

Posted by at 11:00 PM | Permalink

There's an old country song entitled, "I Was Country When Country Wasn't Cool." A few years ago I saw this retooled on a bumper sticker as "I Was Uncool Before Uncool Was Cool," which of course means that said bumper sticker owner was, in fact, cool, because s/he was uncaring about being cool. But you see, I spent much of my life being really and truly uncool. By which I mean that I was always trying to be cool. So does this make me cool or uncool? And if it makes me uncool, does that make me cool? What do you learn about me by reading this paragraph?

In the most recent of a series of thoughtful posts on blogging, truth, and fiction, Elouise considers me as a "character" in the story that is my blog, trying to imagine me based on what a reader learns from what I reveal. I think the majority of readers of my blog have met me in person, but I'm not entirely sure: if you don't comment, I probably don't know you're reading, although my server logs provide some interesting information. (Don't worry. You're not under surveillance.) But what if you haven't met me in person? What do you conclude about me? Here's what Elouise concludes:

• "...bespectacled dude, mid-50s..."
• "...Granola guy..."
• "...Birkenstocks..."
• "...Somewhat unkempt..."
• "...Military brat..."
• "...Whoa...use of the term 'homies'...Minus 20 years..."

Elouise only happens to be singling me out for this kind of analysis. Her larger interest is the way that a blog provides "pieces of a larger puzzle that only approximate the real person. Not until we meet in meatspace, does the abstraction disappear." I'm not sure the abstraction ever does disappear, though. I've known Chuck for ten years, and yet we've communicated more in the last 12 months via the keyboard than we ever did before. And I've learned much more about him from his blog than I did through conversations. The "meat" Chuck and the "blog" Chuck are somewhat separate entities for me, and I don't find myself privileging one over the other.

So what does this have to do with the first paragraph of this entry? I guess I care enough about what other people think of me to be somewhat troubled by the idea that my writing comes across as the work of an unkempt, bespectacled, granola eating, Birkenstock wearing, mid-50s guy.

Now, if I provide details about myself specifically in response to speculations by Elouise, does that violate some sort of prime directive? ("Oooh, a Star Trek allusion. Very interesting.") I'll refrain, then. (Except to say that I wear Doc Martens, not Birkenstocks.) But I do realize that the reason I keep a rough list of what I'm reading and listening to over on the left-hand side of my current front page design is to give readers a sense of who I am outside of what they learn in the entries that I write.

Posted by at 8:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Tuesday, August 5: Driving with my dad into Atlanta was a strange experience. I hadn't really spent significant time there in several years. My family lives outside of the city, so I usually have just flown into the airport and then gone on to somewhere else. The intervening years (and particularly the money pumped in by the 1996 Olympics) have really changed the city a great deal.

One of the biggest changes was the completion of the Presidential Expressway, or what they now call the Freedom Parkway. For the entire time that I lived there (1985-1994), the struggle over an easy way to get from downtown to the Carter Center meant that a big chunk of the city was not being developed in any way, although some houses had been torn down and a bit of clearcutting had taken place, and the resulting stasis (and eyesore) felt sort of representative of Atlanta as a whole: on the verge of some big changes, but waiting for something to happen first.

For the Olympics, however, it just wouldn't do to have this business unfinished, and the new parkway was completed (while I was living in Maryland) with remarkable speed. It's a nicely landscaped, gently meandering stretch of road with a bike path alongside it and some murals and such along the way. Along with the completion of this project has come the gentrification of the northeast-of-downtown region of the city, and I'm sorry to see the sleazy elegance of Ponce de Leon Avenue be replaced with the kind of generic quality that comes from quick real estate developments. All things change, I suppose.

The Majestic Diner (where I spent many a late night eating grits) is still there, however, and the alterna-hip, ironic strip club Clermont Lounge (where I went once to see a friend's band perform), and Fellini's Pizza (where I ate a zillion slices of pizza, and where Chan Marshall apparently used to serve slices before her Cat Power days). But everything is a little bit cleaner, a little bit brighter, and a little bit more upscale. Well, except the Clermont Lounge, as grungy looking as ever from the street, but word is that the Clermont Hotel has been bought and perhaps changes are coming.

One change that was perhaps most startling of all was that the Krispy Kreme on Ponce was either being torn down (no!) or rebuilt. You can get KK donuts in many parts of the country now, of course; hell, you can buy stock, if you like. But, I had always thought that the Ponce location was the Krispy Kreme, the mother ship, the ur-donut shop, the place that started it all. My mom went to this Krispy Kreme when she was in high school. Turns out the company started in North Carolina, but this does not diminish my attachment to this particular location. I hope they are just rebuilding and not replacing.

Hot Donuts Now! Hot Donuts Now! Hot Donuts Now!

*sigh*

Posted by at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Georgia trip continued: On Monday, August 4, my mom dropped me off at my dad's place in Sharpsbug. He spends a large percentage of his time in other parts of the world, but the house he rents in Sharpsburg is in a nice location, surrounded by trees and a well tended garden. He has a porch that overlooks a very large pond, and it was very peaceful sitting there on Tuesday morning drinking coffee and watching the birds, a lone rabbit, and a family of chipmunks go about their business.

We ran some errands, stocking the kitchen after his long stay in Greece, going to a favorite barber, and at one point my dad was going to buy me a massage at a local spa (I had talked about getting one in preparation for the upcoming semester), but alas, they were all booked up. We also rented the The Quiet American (2002), with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. The film, based on Graham Greene's 1955 novel, provides a chilling portrait of American foreign policy as naïve and idealistic on the surface, but profoundly amoral and self-interested at the core. It's a timely reminder, in my opinion. (Also worth a post-9/11 look is 1998's The Siege, which I watched on cable with my mom. This movie would have been better in the hands of an indie director with a smaller budget and less of a penchant for overuse of a stirring soundtrack, but the screenplay is pretty good.)

There were two points at which I realized that consumer electronics (for those who can afford them) have gotten pretty sophisticated, and you don't have to be a techical genius (mostly) to use them.

First, at my dad's gym, the weight machines are all networked to a central computer, located in an ATM-sized kiosk, where you log in before beginning your workout. Then, as you go from machine to machine, you punch in your i.d., and your previous efforts on that machine are presented so you can gauge how much progress you're making (or not). I was blown away. This is obviously a relatively simple thing to pull off, but I had no idea that someone had actually implemented such a system.

Second, my dad's car, a late-model Lexus, is a marvel of modern technology. Well, at least it is to me. The highlight is the GPS-enabled computer display mounted in the dashboard. You simply enter the address of your destination, and the computer displays a map of your progress, and also gives you auditory instructions. This was tricky when we drove to Chuck's place in Atlanta on Tuesday because I was spelling the street incorrectly. Thus, a clash between my way of travelling ("You go by that gas station with the big green sign just after the donut shop and then take a right on the street with all the nice houses.") and my dad's car ("Please enter the correct street address") proved irreconcilable. I won, by the way. It had been probably ten years since I had travelled the route we took to Chuck's place, and Atlanta has changed a great deal since then, but I was able to recognize enough landmarks to get there. And a cellphone call to Chuck when we were close helped, too.

After being dropped off at Chuck, the Atlanta adventures began...

Posted by at 7:52 AM | Permalink

Earlier today, I learned from a post to SHARP-L by Thomas J. Farrell that Walter Ong has died.

It would be almost impossible to exaggerate Ong's influence on the study of print culture and of orality & literacy. I first encountered Ong in a grad school seminar, where Orality and Literacy was an assigned text, and I still return to this book when I need a clearly written reminder of the some of the most important issues I'm working through in my own thinking. Ong's work has not gone unchallenged, of course, and I don't agree with all of his assertions. However, he contributed a great deal to the groundwork of what many of us do, and any scholar would be lucky to have had a fraction of his influence.

Go take a look at the Walter J. Ong Project at St. Louis University, then follow the Amazon links below to get the bibliographic info on some of his published work.

• Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
• The Presence of the Word
• Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, from the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason
• An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry

Posted by at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I haven't had a chance to blog about the rest of my trip to Georgia last week, which was great, but I did want to mention that while at Emory University, I was able to take a look at a collection of manuscript materials of August Toplady assembled by his early twentieth-century biographer, Thomas Wright. He's not exactly a household name, but there are at least two things you should know about Toplady. First, he's the author of a very well-known hymn: "Rock of Ages." Second, he absolutely hated Methodist founder John Wesley because while Toplady was a Calvinist who believed that only an elect few would make their way into heaven, Wesley was an Arminian who argued, instead, that anyone who merited eternal salvation would receive it.

Toplady edited The Gospel Magazine, one of the Calvinist periodicals that spurred Wesley to start his Arminian Magazine in response.

Toplady died when he was only 38, and according to one anecdote there were rumors circulating as he was dying that he had expressed a desire to reconcile with Wesley. He apparently dragged himself off of his deathbed to come announce from the pulpit himself that he desired nothing of the kind.

Update: I should stop assuming everyone knows what era and country I'm talking about. This all took place in eighteenth-century England.

Posted by at 9:48 PM | Permalink

A short entry tonight. Three anti-Bush bumper stickers I've seen in Kansas City in the last few months:

• "Bush is a punkass chump"
• "Any other whore in 2004"
• "If I'd wanted an ex-cokehead for president, I would have voted for David Bowie"

Posted by at 9:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

On May 28, 2003 I wrote an entry about Wagamama's in Manchester, England and described a waiter as follows: "one young gent had a mohawk Frank Gehry could have designed."

Kelefa Sanneh, writing this weekend in the New York Times about Christopher Carrabba of the band Dashboard Confessional writes the following: "his slicked-back hair looks like something Frank Gehry might have dreamed up."

Hmmm.

Posted by at 10:41 PM | Permalink

You know, for whatever reason, I can't suppress the confessional, autobiographical nature of this blog, as much as I'd like to pretend that it's primarily about professional and intellectual issues. So be it. It's both.

After spending Friday night and Saturday morning with my mom, I drove down to Columbus to visit my sister and her family. I had lunch on Sunday with most of my relatives on my dad's side (minus my dad, who was still in Greece) in Columbus. Lima beans, jalapeno cornbread, squash, deviled eggs, potato salad, and fried chicken. Being a tree-hugging, bunny-loving vegetarian, I declined the chicken and devoured two helpings of everything else. Oh, and pound cake. And something called "blueberry crunch." And, of course, sweet tea. And some leftover pizza. And some more of that blueberry crunch.

My sister and I did our once-every-few-years drive around Fort Benning, where our family lived for a couple of tours of duty in the early '70s. I had a strange moment when I realized that the MP who checked our IDs as we drove on base was probably no more than half my age. This was not so much a realization of how old I am as it was a realization that when I go to the places where I used to live, I think of myself as being the age that I was when I lived there.

We drove by our former homes, and while about ten years ago we were surprised at how trashy the old neighborhoods looked, this time they looked much better. There's actual grass in the yard instead of just dirt. The magnolia tree that grew next to our house at the bottom of Austin Loop is gone, however. Something that seems weird to me now, but which I had completely internalized as normal when I was a child, is the fact that there is a nameplate on the front of all the houses on base with not the name of the family who lives there but the name of the soldier who has been assigned that house. So, for example, when we were kids the nameplate would have read "Major Williams." Geez, and I sometimes whine about the hierarchies inherent in academia. Imagine going home at the end of the day and seeing your position within that hierarchy plastered on the front of your house. And all of your neighbors are enmeshed as well. I don't know how we didn't all go crazy being so fully embedded in military life 24/7.

Edward A. White elementary school is still there. I went by a few years ago and talked with the principal, telling her about the time capsule we had buried in fourth grade, to be dug up at the turn of the century. She had had no idea what I was talking about but had been willing to give me a shovel and let me dig around out in front of the school.

Driving off base we went by my grandparents' old house at 45 Ross Avenue, where they lived from before I was born until the late '80s. If there is any building in the world that has a claim on being a place I would call "home" it is this address, for most of my life the one constant thing that I knew would always be there. We went there all the time when I was a small child. I went there for long weekends when I was in college. Now, if this blog were a novel, the following would considered a clunky and obvious metaphor. The house is empty, the yard is overgrown with knee-high grass and weeds, and the neighborhood has clearly taken a turn for the worse. But this blog is not a novel, and the dilapidated state of the house signifies nothing beyond the state of its own decay.

I came back to Newnan last night and helped my mom haul some stuff to Goodwill this morning, clearing out much of her garage. I bought her an iced cafe americano at the newly arrived Newnan Starbucks. Her reaction: "Hey! That's really good!" I'm staying with my dad tonight and tomorrow, and tomorrow evening it's on to Atlanta.

Posted by at 9:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Red dirt. Strip malls. New development. Pine trees. Pickup trucks. My parents retired to Sharpsburg, Georgia (from Mons, Belgium) about thirteen years ago. Sharpsburg is between the larger developments of Newnan (home to country music star Alan Jackson) and Peachtree City (a planned city that for a while was largely a bedroom community for Delta Airlines employees). Sharpsburg is just a few miles down the road from Senoia, which is where they filmed much of the movie Fried Green Tomatoes. Two years ago my parents divorced, after almost forty years of marriage, so now my visits home involve the kind of complications that friends of mine have had to deal with for years. Who do I visit when? How do I navigate between one place and another?

My dad travels the world working for a philanthropic organization called Global Volunteers, and he'll be home from Greece tomorrow night. Around the time of the divorce, my mom opened a metaphysical bookstore (what some might call a New Age bookstore) in Newnan. It's the place to go for lectures on spirituality, meditation classes, reiki healing, palm reading, tarot reading, chakra consultation, books, incense, prayer beads, crystals, or just hanging out and talking.

I have a conflicted relationship with the state of Georgia. On the one hand, almost my entire family lives here. When I was a child, my family lived in Athens and Columbus for a number of years. I went to college here, and lived in Atlanta from 1985 to 1994. On the other hand, I was born on the other side of the country, in Seattle. And living now in Kansas City, I find myself missing Maryland more than Georgia.

The politics of the peach state are not exactly the most progressive in the country. To be fair, though, the civil rights movement had a strong foothold here. Martin Luther King was from Atlanta. Jimmy Carter, of course, is from Georgia, and there are not many who have done more for human rights in the last couple of decades. Millard Fuller's Habitat for Humanity started here. There's a strong LGBT community in Atlanta.

There's an interesting tradition of art and music associated with this state. There are good colleges and universities here. Things are more integrated, racially speaking, than one might assume from the South's stereotyped reputation. But people still say really stupid things about race, class, and sexuality. Well, name a place where that doesn't happen, I guess.

In some ways it pains me not to live here, but when I did live here I never felt like I belonged, and there was more than a little pain associated with that feeling. Part of this is perhaps the legacy of growing up in a military family that moved every 2 or 3 years. You never belong anywhere. Yes, I know, break out the violins. After living in Maryland for a few years, it became easier to come back home (ha! see, I used the word "home") to Georgia and not feel uncomfortable because I was no longer trying to fulfill some kind of (surely imagined on my part) state-wide expectation for behavior or attitude. How can an entire state make you feel comfortable or uncomfortable? I don't know.

Still thinking this through.

Otis Redding. Little Richard. Allman Brothers. B-52s. REM. Outkast.

Flannery O'Connor. Alice Walker.

I belong to the South. I don't belong in the South.

Posted by at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Often, I am too cautious. I don't pursue things because I talk myself into thinking they'll never work, or they'll be received negatively, or ... any number of reasons.

I'm trying to be a little less cautious. So I'll go ahead and announce that I'm working on a idea for a kind of poetry blog. Details will be forthcoming at some point in the future. I think it will be cool.

While you wait (with baited breath, I'm sure), check out the website for UMKC's "magazine of writing and art," New Letters.

Oh, and Poetry Blam was Jeff's idea for this embryonic idea (slam+blog=blam). But I'm not making any promises about using it or not using it.

Posted by at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

This has been a pretty long stretch of silence for me on here. But offline, I've been getting some good work done on the article growing out of the paper I delivered at SHARP that I hope to have sent off to a journal before the fall semester comes. So that's where my writing energy has gone, I guess. Outside of writing these entries, I find writing hard going, but I guess that's true for just about everyone.

I leave for Georgia today to visit family and to do a bit of research at Emory University's libraries. Pitts Theology Library has a copy of the microform collection called "The People called Methodists," which contains useful stuff for me. And the Special Collections and Archives at Woodruff Library has a lot of valuable material on Methodist History.

Best of all, I'll get to see my homies, Chuck and Mike.

I might blog the trip, I might not. We'll see.

Posted by at 9:45 AM | Permalink