luminous blue variables
Unable to sleep, I am reminded by Miriam of the Poem on Your Blog idea. Today is the last day of National Poetry Month.
Check out "Luminous Blue Variables," by my colleague Michelle Boisseau.
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Unable to sleep, I am reminded by Miriam of the Poem on Your Blog idea. Today is the last day of National Poetry Month.
Check out "Luminous Blue Variables," by my colleague Michelle Boisseau.
If you'll look at the bottom of the sidebar on the right, gentle reader, you'll notice a little banner ad for Booksense, "a family of independent-bookseller websites." I am now a Booksense affiliate because, as I discussed earlier, I'd like to be able to encourage sales at places other than Amazon.com, even while recognizing that the Amazon site provides some very useful features. The publishing ecosystem needs diversity. Hmmm, maybe I should provide links to both. Becoming an affiliate allows me to link directly to a listing for a book on Booksense rather than on Amazon. Kathleen's done it, and you should consider getting on board, too.
Below the fold are the Booksense search results for independent booksellers in close proximity to my zip code.
Your search for Postal Code = 64105 returned 13 results.
I Love A Mystery® (5.5 miles)At I Love A Mystery®, the decor is "Victorian library" with a twist. Visitors are greeted at the door by a gargoyle, while the sales desk is guarded by a life-size skeleton. Daggers, skulls and poison bottles may be tucked into nooks and crannies, but the atmosphere is cozy. The store, which is located in Mission, Kansas (just across the state line from Kansas City, Missouri), is home to about 20,000 used and 3,000 new mystery books.
Independent Bookseller since 1975. Full line, full service, with experienced, knowledgeable staff to give customers the best service. "Gold Standard" Author Events Series. Technologies used with insight are available in store online.
Home of A. Bitterman, the children's book industry's most reviled and incendiary book reviewer and spokesperson for the Grote Reber Society. Also, check out our current listings of in-store author events, story times, book clubs and 16mm films.
Books Plus 913-398-2787 - Audio Book rental- over 3000 titles - Fiction, business, self help- All the N.Y. Times Bestsellers! Rent by week, month. Credit for used books 1/4 price. Call collect.
Full service, new & used books, specializing in children's, mystery, & romance. Free gift wrap, most special orders in 3-5 days. Personalized service to help you select the best books to suit YOUR taste.
Mystery. Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock's Home. Tea Room.
Specializing in children's books, new and used, and special ordering of all titles, the Book Barn is in historic Leavenworth, the first community in KS. The store is located in the first funeral parlor in KS. We have many excellent regional titles.
Everyday Savings in this quaint location. Books 30% to 75% Off daily, most books 1/2 off cover price, Magazines 10% off. Educational games & toys round out our selection. We sell books the old-fashioned way: we read them.
A full service book & toy store in Sedalia, Missouri.
Full-line general bookstore & office supply store. Special orders placed weekly. Book club membership offering special savings is available. Free gift wrapping and local delivery. We also offer a full line of office supplies and office furniture.
We carry over 2000 magazine titles! Large selection of science fiction and psychology books as well as general fiction and non-fiction. We will ship anywhere in the US for $2.50 per book and $1 each additional. Special orders are easy with us!
Via Slashdot: Sony, Phillips, and E-Ink have teamed up to produce a reading device -- christened the Librié -- with a display that mimics the features of paper.
The hardware technology that makes such a display possible is amazing, but really, the key details as to why this device is a bad idea are to be found in this story from The Guardian:
To keep a tight rein on the flow of ebooks, 15 major publishers and newspapers, including Kodansha, Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun, have teamed up with Sony to form a company called Publishing Link and to provide content through a website known as Timebook Town.
[T]he sting in the tail is that each title is really only borrowed. Thanks to Open MG protection, the content is unreadable after two months, so it's best to think of the Librié experience as a library of sorts.
Okay, let's review.
| Librié | Library book |
| The size of a paperback book. | Often the size of a paperback book. |
| Reading surface almost captures all the desirable features of paper. | Reading surface captures all the desirable features of paper because it is paper. |
| You can read the book (which you have paid for) for up to two months. | You can read the book (which you've checked out for free) for up to two months. |
| The device costs almost $400. | Library privileges usually free. |
There are billions of pages of information available for free on the Internet, but with this device, you get to pay for the privilege of reading material in a proprietary format that makes the content disappear after two months. More expensive then paper books and less durable? Where do I sign up!?
Oh yeah, this product is sure to be a big success!
The history of reading teaches us that readers engage in a wide array of complex and unpredicatable behaviors. Rare book rooms the world over are filled with evidence of this fact. One of the strengths of the "old-fashioned" book format is that it supports a wide array of complex and unpredicatable behaviors. Digital media present an opportunity to widen that range of possible behaviors even further: build your own concordances of your favorite works in seconds, search your personal library for other occurences of an interesting word or phrase, make your own literary "smash ups" by slicing and dicing plots, create an electronic commonplace book.
How sad that these possibilities have yet to be made available in a dedicated reading device. Any reading format that attempts to put absolute boundaries upon reading behaviors is bound to fail because attempts to make readers submit will breed resentment. Either someone will hack the Librié, or it will flop.
See also these stories on the Librié: NY Times, Forbes, C|NET.
I've just finished Ellen Ullman's The Bug. I'm considering teaching the novel next spring in my honors section of English 225, the second course in the composition sequence at UMKC. Ullman describes the interaction between human and machine with a remarkably poetic voice, such as this passage where programmer Ethan Levin reads an email from a technical consultant and then ponders a software bug he's trying to solve:
It all presented itself as a continuum: hardware at the bottom, with all its miniature mechanics and electronics, becoming at each step upward more abstract, becoming software. It produced in him a certain vertiginous pleasure--this glimpse into the slip-space between the hard and soft, the physical and mental worlds, layer upon layer of human thought turned into chips, circuit boards, programs. And it struck him, as it sometimes did these days, how briefly physical the computer was. All software on the top, then just a small layer where it was only dumb wire and plastic and silicon--beneath which everything immediately turned abstract again: the intelligence of the circuits, "logic gates" designed with software and etched into chips, through which moved the bits of stuff human beings had named "electrons." (45)
Coincidentally, I'm dealing with my own bug as the university's "Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access" email server is only letting me log in about one out of every twenty attempts. The very patient folks in the university IT department can't find anything wrong. As for me, I miss telnet and pine, and I'm very tired of Microsoft. Apple is selling 12" iBooks for under a thousand bucks, and I'm very tempted. I'm using OpenOffice for my office-related tasks, GIMP for my image editing, MovableType for most of my website management tasks lately, and jEdit for my text encoding. Hmm. If only I could remember why I decided to go with this laptop running m$.
Matt first piqued my interest in The Bug, btw.
When I lived off of Northside Drive in Atlanta in the late '80s, I used to drive past a women's health clinic on the way home from class, and for several weeks (months?) there were anti-abortion protesters camped out on the sidewalk near the clinic: Operation Rescue was a new movement then, Randall Terry its charismatic leader. Terry denounced abortion, birth control, divorce, homosexuality, and the usual assortment of radical right obsessions.
Fast forward to the year 2004: The Washington Post reports that Terry's son, Jamiel, has written an essay for Out magazine about coming to terms with being gay. Two of Randall Terrry's daughters have gotten pregnant without being married, and he has traded in his first wife for a younger model.
And still he takes on the air of the righteously indignant, telling whoever will listen about how untrustworthy his children are. This is what hatred and hypocrisy look like.
Jamiel is quoted in the Post: "We were taught that if you saw pain in the world, you should speak out. I knew that because of my name I could get published and help young men and women who are gay and struggling because of their religious upbringing."
This is really just a "Hey, isn't this cool?" kind of post, and I guess I've had a lot of those lately. Take a look at Joseph Viscomi's chapter on William Blake's "Illuminated Printing" techniques.
“Illuminated Printing” was first published in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, edited by Morris Eaves, 2003. It is republished here by permission of Cambridge University Press. While the text remains the same, the electronic version has 95 illustrations versus 9 in the printed version. The illustrations demonstrate in detail the stages of both Blake’s relief etching (“illuminated printing”) and conventional intaglio etching according to the six “Chambers” in the “Printing house in Hell,” from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The comparison of these two methods of etching will help reveal what was borrowed, altered, invented, and radical in Blake’s new mode of graphic production. The illustrations, which are linked to enlargements that have detailed captions, supplement the text but also function autonomously as slide shows on the technical and aesthetic contexts in which illuminated printing was invented, and as tutorials in the production of engravings, etchings, and relief etchings.
Fascinating stuff. Without the Blake Archive, I would not be able to teach Blake the way that I do.
Slate presents a slide-show of artwork created from the results of a homophobic book vandal's assault on the San Francisco Public Library.
Well, this is news to me:
Since the late 1980s, the [Special Collections division of the University of Missouri-Columbia Libraries] has been involved in building a collection of cartoon and comic art that's used by scholars, students and comic enthusiasts of all ages. The Comic Art Collection, which includes original comic strip art, animation cells, printed comic strips and books about cartooning and graphic novels, originated from a number of MU alumni, faculty and library staff members.
V. T. Hamlin, creator of Alley Oop and Mort Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois, are MU alums. Art Stack, an underground cartoonist perhaps most famous recently for his work on Harvey Pekar's Our Cancer Year, was on faculty in the MU art department.
I've always been just a bit uneasy about linking to Amazon.com when mentioning a book on my blog. I often use the site when making my own purchases, but I also like to support independent booksellers and should make use of them more often. I mean, my own mother owns an independent bookstore, for Pete's sake. Amazon is just so darned convenient, though!
Then I noticed that Beatrice linked to a site called Booksense, which describes itself as "a family of independent-bookseller websites." It looks like once you become an affiliate of Booksense, you can provide links to their site that allow users to locate a local independent bookseller stocking the book you've mentioned. I'll try to start using this site instead of Amazon.
By the way, if you're ever in Newnan, Georgia and you need some metaphysical supplies, stop by my mom's bookstore.
Chuck reports that Georgia universities are seeking a 10% tuition increase. The four University of Missouri campuses have recently seen a 7.5% tuition increase approved . If this trend continues, eventually the amount of money contibuted by students will far outweigh the amount of money contributed by the state, which raises two important questions. First, won't this situation undermine the goal of public education? Second, has anyone thought about how much worse the The student is the customer, and the customer is always right problem will become?
Via Slashdot:
LukePieStalker writes "Former English professor Eric Brown has published the first work in what he claims is a new literary category called the 'digital epistolary novel', or DEN. 'Intimacies', based on an 18th century novel, requires the DEN 1.2 software. The program's interface has windows for mock e-mail, instant messaging, Web browser and pager, through which the narrative unfolds. For those wishing to create their own works in this genre, Mr. Brown is marketing composition software called DEN WriterWare."
Also mentioned over at scribblingwoman.
I'm going to a university event at the Webster House this afternoon, and since there's a fancy-pants website, I thought I'd link to it.
PBS has an interesting program called Religion and Ethics (If you live in the U.S., use this tool to see when it airs in your region. Here in KC it comes on at 12:30 on Sundays on KCPT.) This weekend "American Evangelicals," part 1 of 4, will be shown.
Relevant resources at the PBS site:
An AP reporter called me this afternoon asking to arrange an interview. It seems he read the story that Heidi did for the University News and now he's interested, too.
I've gotten more mileage out of saying I'm going to get a tattoo without actually getting a tattoo, yet, than I would have thought possible.
I've mentioned David Liss before. He's the author of three well-reviewed historical novels: A Conspiracy of Paper, The Coffee Trader, and A Spectacle of Corruption. This Wednesday, Liss will discuss his work and sign copies of his books at Unity Temple on the Plaza: 707 W. 47th Street, 7 p.m. For more information, call Rainy Day Books at (913) 384-3126.
In the interests of experimenting with a variety of online, collaborative technologies, I installed a very simple wiki. Play around with it, if you like. It's the simplest one I could find: PhpWiki.
I'm not sure, yet, what use I/we might have for a wiki, but it's worth experimenting. If you're unfamiliar with wikis, check out the relevant entry in the Wikipedia. I think I would install MediaWiki if I had a specific project in mind because it seems to provide more controls over editing.
As Heidi and BlogKC point out, the new downtown library opens tomorrow morning at 7:00 a.m. I'm pretty darned excited:
I've never lived this close to a library before, much less one as grand as this. I know where I'll be spending a lot of time this summer. Oh, and this just cements my belief that development in downtown Kansas City is going to explode in the next decade or so. If you can afford to buy a condo, do so now.
The latest volume of Romantic Praxis is entitled Romantic Libraries and includes three essays:
The "about" page reads:
This volume seeks to make more visible in Romantic studies not just the ubiquitous bookishness of the period but the role of the physical book in personal and cultural identity-formations. In different ways, all three essays in the volume concentrate on how the public and national role of libaries as institutions of circulation was not only given affective charge but also often unsettled by an individual relationship to books and by the formation of private libraries as personal sites of collection and memory.
As part of this week's Literature for Life Week activities, the Undergraduate English Council sponsored an open mic night tonight, which I attended. Folks read their poetry, their fiction, and on the spur of the moment, I decided to read a couple of blog entries: Self indulgent autobiography followed by Who do you love?. It was an interesting experience.
...is apparently a phrase uttered by Prince Charles. An interview with Eagleton was published in the NYT in January, but recently cropped up on C18-L. Conversation has ensued, although not so much about the issues Eagleton raises in the interview.
Eagleton misses the mark when he says that theorists aren't addressing the "big questions" he wants them to address. On religion, for example, see The Puppet and the Dwarf : The Perverse Core of Christianity, On Belief (Thinking in Action) , and The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? by Slavoj Zizek and Acts of Religion, by Jacques Derrida.
Excerpt:
"The golden age of cultural theory is long past," Mr. Eagleton writes in his new book, "After Theory" (Basic Books), to be published in the United States in January. In this age of terrorism, he says, cultural theory has become increasingly irrelevant, because theorists have failed to address the big questions of morality, metaphysics, love, religion, revolution, death and suffering.
Today graduate students and professors are bogged down in relativism, writing about sex and the body instead of the big issues. "On the wilder shores of academia," he writes, "an interest in French philosophy has given way to a fascination with French kissing."
His critique goes further. "The postmodern prejudice against norms, unities and consensuses is a politically catastrophic one," he writes. Cultural theorists can no longer "afford simply to keep recounting the same narratives of class, race and gender, indispensable as these topics are."
What Mr. Eagleton, one of the few remaining Marxist critics, wants now is a search for absolutes, for norms, for answers to what he calls "fundamental questions of truth and love in order to meet the urgencies of our global situation."
The following is the description for my Fall 2004 permutation of "Histories of Reading, Writing, and Publishing," a course that I proposed back in September:
Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal Darkness buries All.
–Alexander Pope
We tend to have such faith in books that we assume the printing press brought with it a wave of enlightenment, as publishing restrictions loosened and print production escalated over the course of the early modern period. As the above quote from Pope demonstrates, eighteenth-century observers were not always so optimistic. This course will explore the profound changes taking place from the seventeenth century into the eighteenth as Britain transformed into a print culture.
We will consider several questions. What are the cultural and theoretical implications of different forms of verbal communication and representation, such as speech, manuscript, or print? How did the practices of authorship, readership, and publishing change during this period? What effect did these changes have on the production, distribution, and reception of such traditionally literary materials as essays, novels, and poetry as well as of other materials such as newspapers, magazines, and dictionaries? How did these changes affect, or engender, the fields of journalism, evangelicalism, politics, and literary studies? We will address these issues through a reading of several different seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts as well as of key contemporary scholarly works. We are likely to read works by Addison & Steele, Behn, Barker, Blake, Donne, Haywood, Hogarth, Johnson, Milton, Pope, Wesley, and Whitefield.
Students can expect to complete class presentations, a take-home exam, an annotated bibliography, and a final research paper building upon the research completed for the annotated bibliography. Graduate students should expect to complete more in-depth research and writing than undergraduate students.
Checking in on the daily news at Pitchforkmedia, I came across a reference to "the D.C.-based 'punk rock kids' show' Pancake Mountain" and I thought, "There's a punk rock kids' show named Pancake Mountain?"
Yes, there is.
Via the listserv of the History of Reading Special Interest Group:
50th Annual International Reading Association Convention
San Antonio, Texas
May 1-5, 2005
In response to the International Reading Association's desire to have consistency in all programs for the 50th Annual Meeting in San Antonio, the History of Reading SIG must have its programs ready to submit to IRA Headquarters by June 1, 2004. Therefore, proposals for presenting at the History of Reading SIG in Toronto [sic, I think they mean in San Antonio] must be received by May 1, 2004.
A proposal may relate to any area of reading but will have a greater chance
of acceptance if it addresses the organization's intended purpose. The
purpose of the History of Reading SIG, as stated in its constitution, is to
“encourage historical research in the field of reading and literacy, to
provide a forum for exchange of ideas and information about the history of
reading and reading instruction, and to promote the development of a body
of historical knowledge about reading and literacy.”
Criteria for judging the merit of a proposal shall be:
? 1. Consistency of the proposal's subject and content with the History of
Reading SIG's purpose as stated in its constitution. (30 points)
? 2. Clarity of the proposal (30 points)
? 3. Potential for generating interest in a large segment of the History of
Reading membership. (20 points)
? 4. Uniqueness and originality of the proposal (10 points)
? 5. Potential for adding new information to the body of knowledge (10
points)
PROGRAM PROPOSAL COVER SHEET
HISTORY OF READING - INTEREST GROUP
International Reading Association
San Antonio, 2005
DIRECTIONS: Follow these steps in submitting a proposal.
1. On a separate sheet, prepare a 200-300 word abstract of the paper to be
presented at the History of Reading SIG in San Antonio. Include the title
of the paper, but do not list author(s) or affiliation(s). Proposals will
receive blind review and will be judged by the criteria included in this
call.
2. Submit one (1) copy of the cover sheet and three (3) copies of the
summary to: Marilyn McKinney, CEB 354, College of Education, MS 3005,
University of Nevada at Las Vegas, 4505 Maryland Parkway, Las Vegas, NV
89154 USA, 702-895-3337 (work). Electronic submissions should be sent to:
marilyn@unlv.edu or marilyn@unlv.nevada.edu All submissions must be
received by May 1, 2004.
***************************************************************************
********
1. Full title of paper as you wish it to appear on the program:
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________
2. Principal contact information:
Name: _______________________________________________________
Address: _____________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________
Telephone No.:__________________(Work) _____________________(Home)
Email address:_________________________________________
3. Author's name and affiliation:
First author's name and affiliation: ___________________________
________________________________________________________
Second author's name and affiliation:__________________________
________________________________________________________
Third author's name and affiliation: __________________________
________________________________________________________
Have you presented at a History of Reading SIG meeting before? YES___ NO___
=============================================
Kurt Cobain and I were both born just outside of Seattle in January of early 1967. I worked on an entry early this morning that began with, "I want to tell you to just say no to the Cobain hagiography (Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Associated Press, Seattle Times, Launch Yahoo, New Musical Express)."
I wrote more, but I couldn't figure out how to end it, so instead, I'm going to just tell you to go read this article on the reunion and current tour of the Pixies.
Okay, I'll also include this part of what I was writing earlier: "In his WaPo piece, David Segal writes, 'Kurt Cobain would detest all the re-eulogizing prompted by the 10th anniversary of his suicide.' No he wouldn't. Here, Segal participates in one of the shadiest elements of tending to the rock star ethos, something no respectable music journalist should do, in my opinion. Cobain was a rock star, and part of being a rock star is to express disdain for being a rock star. It's cool not to want to be seen as cool. It should be the music journalist's job to call rock stars out on this duplicity. Cobain was as involved in the fashioning of his own indie image as anyone. In Heavier than Heaven, Charles Cross explains that although Cobain told interviewers that the first concert he attended was Black Flag, he had actually seen Sammy Hagar previously."
In his suicide note, Cobain quoted Neil Young, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." I wonder if his daughter would agree. I also wonder if Cobain knew this song by Young:
I am a childI am a child, I'll last a while.
You can't conceive
of the pleasure in my smile.
You hold my hand,
rough up my hair,
It's lots of fun
to have you there.
God gave to you,
now, you give to me,
I'd like to know
what you learned.
The sky is blue
and so is the sea.
What is the color,
when black is burned?
What is the color?
You are a man, you understand.
You pick me up
and you lay me down again.
You make the rules,
you say what's fair,
It's lots of fun
to have you there.
God gave to you,
now, you give to me,
I'd like to know
what you learned.
The sky is blue
and so is the sea.
What is the color,
when black is burned?
What is the color?
I am a child, I'll last a while.
You can't conceive
of the pleasure in my smile.
Via Liz, Michael Froomkin, Norman Geras, and Jewschool: here's the Wikipedia entry on the word "jew" and the Judaism 101 answer to the question, "Who is a jew?"
Via The New York Times: Two economists have released the draft of a study concluding that illegal music "[d]ownloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates." Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have conducted what the Times is calling "the first study that makes a rigorous economic comparison of directly observed activity on file-sharing networks and music buying."
[T]hey analyzed the direct data of music downloaders over a 17-week period in the fall of 2002, and compared that activity with actual music purchases during that time. Using complex mathematical formulas, they determined that spikes in downloading had almost no discernible effect on sales. Even under their worst-case example, "it would take 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by one copy," they wrote. "After annualizing, this would imply a yearly sales loss of two million albums, which is virtually rounding error" given that 803 million records were sold in 2002. Sales dropped by 139 million albums from 2000 to 2002.
So why have sales been dropping? Here's my take, and keep in mind it's only a theory unsupported by any rigorous analysis: because most music being produced by the music industry sucks. And the level of suckitude (or suckage, if you're a speaker of French) appears to be following an upward trajectory.
I signed up for a free account with Kinja, having read about it on misbehaving.net.. You can read my digest of favorite info sources if you like.
I bought a print copy of the NY Times for my flight to Boston last week. One of the best sections of the Times is their food section. Last week, there was a great article by Julia Moskin entitled, "After Centuries, the Vegetarian Feast of India Finally Arrives." Moskin writes,
With the arrival here of South Indian vegetarian staples like dosas and uttapams, samosa chat and idlis, Indian cooking in New York is finally reflecting how Indians eat in India. And that often means vegetarian meals at least twice a day, or an entirely vegetarian home kitchen. Indian restaurants outside India have rarely reflected the central role of vegetarian cooking in Indian life, or its varied flavors.
Ah, it is to laugh. Ten years after L and I ate first began eating about once a week at Udupi Palace in the DC area, the Times explains to its readers what dosas, uttapams, and idlis are. And KC has Udipi Cafe. Who says New York is the cutting edge?
Via SHARP-L, this sounds interesting:
The editors of Print Areas: Book History in India solicit articles for the second volume of the series. Articles may be on any aspect of the history of the book in the Indian subcontinent as well as adjacent or related areas / countries. Articles should ideally be 4,000-8,000 words long and should be written in accordance with the 14th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, with endnotes in the Humanities style. Submissions should be typed in double-space and should not carry the name of the author on the main body. Articles may either be posted to the address below or e-mailed to offog@vsnl.com. In case of e-mail submissions, please attach the article as an RTF document. The last date for receiving submissions is 30 September 2004.
Dr Abhijit Gupta
Prof. Swapan Chakravorty
Department of English
Jadavpur University
Kolkata 700 032
INDIA
Tel: 91-33-24146681
Telefax: 91-33-24137903