thanks for not being a zombie

Why is it that people who play their music too loudly (in their car in the alley behind your building, for example, or in the apartment next door) always play crappy music?

New next-door neighbors moved in yesterday. They look like adults, but I've been treated to what sounds like MTV pop/r&b all afternoon. Just once I'd like to hear a car drive by blasting Liz Phair, the Pixies, say, or the Clash.

Okay, how do I deal with this? "Hi, I'm your neighbor. Would you turn that shit down?" No, that won't work. "Hi, I'm your neighbor. You know, you're obviously so clueless about apartment living we'll probably be able to hear you having sex." Nope. "Hi, you voted for Bush, didn't you?" Nah. "Hi. Ever hear of the social contract?" Uh-unh.

Suggestions?

Posted by at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The 2005 meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies will take place in Las Vegas, baby! The calls for papers are available online. I'll be chairing the SHARP panel:

“The Fate of Script in an Age of Print”

It is generally acknowledged that the technology of print facilitated many important cultural transformations during the eighteenth century. However, manuscript practices clearly did not disappear with the advent of print. This panel invites scholars from all fields to interrogate the boundary between the cultures of manuscript and print in the eighteenth century and to investigate the ways in which their histories might be said to overlap. Materials of interest might include but are not limited to commonplace books, diaries, graffiti, letters, marginalia, recipes, record keeping, and shorthand. Papers are welcome from those working in a variety of languages and in a variety of national traditions.

Proposals from non-SHARP members are welcome with the understanding that they must become members of SHARP if their paper is accepted and they agree to present. Please send one page abstracts for this panel to williamsgh@umkc.edu by September 15, 2004.

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I've given voices (mp3, 2.2M) to Matt's cicadas . This sound file is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

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Jason J. provides links to some interesting readings for a summer seminar titled "The Future of the Page."

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If you're going to be in New York in early June, this announcement, via SHARP-L, might be of interest to you:

The New York Chapter of the American Printing History Association is pleased to announce a lecture by Mark Batty, of Mark Batty Publishing, Ltd., on June 2, 2004 at the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York, NY at 6 p.m. Mr Batty will be speaking on the complexities, trials and tribulations of making a new edition of Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683), the first book ever written on printing and printing types. The text, edited by bibliographer John Lane, has been extensively annotated and expanded for scholars and artists in the fields of printing, typography and the graphic arts. The new edition is based on that of the Oxford Univesity Press (1962), edited by Herbert David and Harry Carter.

The event is free and open to the public. More information about the event is available on the APHA website calendar. For information about the New York Chapter, contact its president Lowell Bodger at 212 777-0841 or write to APHA-NY, PO Box 1074, New York, NY 10278.

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There are many beautiful things on the world wide web. This, from the people who brought you this, is one of them

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Via Slashdot:

prostoalex writes "The question of the best weblogging system out there arises quite often, especially after the new licensing scheme introduced by MovableType. Here's a rather detailed breakdown of currently popular blogging and content management systems. Out of 11 software packages, 10 run on any server with variations of Perl/PHP and MySQL/PostgresSQL, and one requires Windows and .NET Framework. 4 are licensed under GPL, 3 are under BSD. Mark Pilgrim explains why licensing is suddenly important."

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In a recent conversation, my grandma was impressed with how much time off I get during the summer. And it's true. With the exception of the following responsibilities, I have a three-month vacation. What to do? What to do?

The fall semester begins in thirteen weeks. One week of that will probably involve visiting family and friends in Georgia. For the rest, I have the following task list, which I hope to refine gradually:

• Get a tattoo.
• Reading
• Orality / literacy
• Critical literacy studies
• Theorizing media in transition
• Early modern print culture
• Eighteenth-century Methodism
• Writing
• Book proposal
• Article on eighteenth-century Methodist periodicals
• Article on eighteenth-centurry Methodist preaching
• Article on authorship attribution study of a particular preacher's sermons
• Revising a few grant applications for resubmission and mapping out grant deadlines
• Travel
• Three weeks researching at the Methodist Archives and Research Centre in Manchester, England
• One week at SHARP 2004 conference in Lyon, France
• Work on my academic portfolio in preparation for my third-year review next January
• Computing
• Tweak the department website
• Perhaps purchase a 12" iBook.
• Project work for Romantic Circles
• Experiment with Drupal (note this and this), WordPress, MediaWiki, PG Distributed Proofreaders.
• Work on ideas for Poetry Blam and Lit Out Loud. I've been experimenting with the sound editor Audacity with good results.
• Figure out if Palimpsest is worth continuing. I think it is, but perhaps with a different structure and perhaps run off of software other than MovableType .
• Teaching
• Prep for Intro to Shakespearean Drama
• Re-read the plays
• Watch the films
• Read Corrigan's book on writing about film (thanks for the recommendation, Chuck!)
• Prep for Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing
• Much of this preparation will take place as I complete the reading listed at the top of this entry.
• Plan next year's involvement in the UMKC Arts & Sciences Honors Program
• Create budget
• Year-long colloquium
• Honors section of English 225
• Academic Service Learning: Partnership with University Academy
• Honors conference in the spring.
• Digital honors journal

In short, summer is a busy time for those of us who work in academia!

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... at the Reading Reptile.

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All the pix from the trip to San Francisco are now online. I used Web Album Generator, a free program, to create the gallery. There are no captions in my gallery right now, but the program makes it very easy to add them if you so desire.

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Hey there, Mikey D. here, taking over G's blog for a few minutes.

One of the supreme pleasures of academic life (how many are there?), it seems to me is that you can marshall your few opportunities for travel in such a way as to get a chance to see your best friends now and again. This is exactly how I have ended up in KC for a glorious two-day hang out with L and G.

I was in St. Louis for the national Writing Across the Curriculum conference and took a train from there to KC--an almost six hour ride--4 of which were without air conditioning. Sweltering heat complimented with the voluminous, innane ramblings of some drunk-ass yahoo on his way to "Jeff City" (that's Jefferson City, MO, yo) to go fishing. I'm no great fan of Jeff Foxworthy, but a line of his came to mind: if you've ever been too drunk to fish, you might be a redneck. Case in point.

My car had no air conditioning, and yet not so the other two cars behind me which I was not allowed to move to, for they were transporting a gaggle of young white Christians to God knows where (stipulating for this purpose that there is a god, of course).

A pilgrimmage of some sort to KC? God only knows. All I know is that I was cursing those God-lovin', stupid headgear-wearing pre-teens as they paraded through my car with the gall to complain about the heat and close air as they passed through on their way to the dining car. Ah, but suffering makes you stronger to do God's work, don't it?

But I arrived still relatively hydrated and not so funky as I thought I would be, as after the sun set and the bulk of passengers disembarked at Jeff City, things cooled off a bit and my antiperspirant was steadfast. And now I'm hanging at palace L/G diggin' My Aim is True, petting Max, my dear old friend and fuzzy former-denizen of Hyattsville, MD. We have a modest two days planned, including, I'm told a birthday party for G&L's friends' two year old. I am told that we're going to a farm for the event, and that there will be goats.

Hell, yes, this is going to be a great visit!

Posted by at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Jason's the Shepherd for the Wordherders, and he's already posted an entry on how the changes in MT's payment schedule will affect our multiple blogs.

However, I also maintain a bunch of blogs over on Jeff's CHLT server, so I thought I'd describe how I use MT there and whether these changes will push me to adopt another content management system.

First of all, I've adopted Liz Lawley's brilliant MT Courseware hack for my classes. I'm sort of confused as to what the new pricing scheme is for MT 3.0, but my understanding is that the free version will allow for one author and three blogs. I like to leave my course websites online even after the course is finished, however, and so I'll hit the three-blog limit pretty quickly if I upgrade.

Additionally, I have frequently assigned a game of Ivanhoe, using MT as the game platform. This requires me to add, temporarily, all 30 or so students as authors to my MT installation. I don't think I'd be able to do this at all under the new rules.

For the above applications, two tasks are very inconvenient using MovableType. First, adding thirty new authors to the Ivanhoe games takes way too long; I'd prefer an HTML form that allows me to enter all thirty at once in a grid, rather than clicking my way through the same one-author-at-a-time form thirty times. Second, adding all the content for Liz's MT Courseware takes way too long; again, a grid that allows you to enter multiple entries using one form would cut back on a very onerous task.

As long as MovableType was free, I was willing to put up with these inconveniences on the backend in exchange for the elegant beauty of the frontend. But if I'm going to be asked to pay, I'd have to think twice about whether such shortcomings were acceptable.

Posted by at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This guy seemed to want to check in at our hotel.

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Welcome to the Ozarks. This ain't San Francisco, Toto.

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On Thursday, we walked from the hotel to Chinatown, where we spent about an hour before walking up to the aforementioned Coit Tower. Pix below the fold...

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Earlier today, somewhere around Pike's Peak.

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This is your intrepid blogger in front of a bronze Buddha cast in 1790. The Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park is a beautiful and peaceful spot.

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Walking down the (steep!) hill from Coit Tower, we saw many little gardens like this one.

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Wow.

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How could you visit City Lights and not buy a copy of Howl?

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I was born in this time zone, so maybe I'm meant to be here. Or, as someone said tonight at dinner, "I'm a blue and green person, not a brown and green person."

I have lots of details to share (and great photos), but that will have to wait until I get back home. I fly out of here tomorrow at 2:00, and then on Monday morning, I leave for a retreat in the Ozarks.

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Scene 1: An elevator at Coit Tower.

Random Guy. Elevator Operator. Me.

Random Guy: "Hey, is this a radio station?"

Elevator Operator: "Yeah."

RG: "Which one?"

EO: "KOIT"

RG: "Oh, of course. Because this is the Coit tower."

EO: "No, that's a radio station. This is a tower."

RG: "I know, but they have the same name."

EO: "No, the station is K-O-I-T. The tower is C-O-I-T."

RG: "Right, because all radio stations start with a K."

Me, disobeying the prime directive: "Actually, all radio stations east of the Mississippi start with a W. Those west of the Mississippi start with a K."

RG: "Really?"

Me: "Yeah."

RG: "They're not different in the South?"

Me: "Nope."

Exeunt

Posted by at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

According to Pitchforkmedia, Wilco is about to head out on tour in support of their new album A Ghost is Born, which you can listen to in its entirety online. They are scheduled to perform in Manchester (UK) on July 14 at Manchester Academy, a venue I passed twice a day last summer as I trekked between The Verdene and the John Rylands University Library. I should, in fact, be in Manchester on July 14 and will probably be staying only a short walk from the venue. So while their show in Columbia (MO) was cancelled, it looks like I'll get to see them after all.

In other music news, I recently purchased Loretta Lynn's new album, the Jack White-produced Van Lear Rose (iTunes), largely because I liked what I heard when she performed "Portland, Oregon" on the David Letterman show recently. I've picked what I think are the four best tracks (iTunes iMix), if you want to give her new music a try.

This morning we leave for San Francisco, where we will be staying at the Hotel Rex. Apparently, we will be close to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore, a landmark of American literary history. It's been twenty years since my last visit to the city. My junior year of high school was spent in northern California, a beautiful part of the world. Unfortunately, it was one in a string of bad years: four schools and three countries in four years. That was a long time ago, though.

William Gibson's Pattern Recognition will be coming along as airplane reading. The very first page features this particularly nice passage:

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct, that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

The aforementioned graduation present will be, as Sheri suggested, cash.

Posted by at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Not that you've complained, dear reader, but I find myself overwhelmed by the nature of the developments in our "liberation" of Iraq (and reactions to said developments) to write anything sustained and thoughtful. I have a PhD. I should be, like, smart and stuff. Yet I find myself wanting to write these snarky little entries. Hit and run. Kibbles and bits. What good do they do?

Some thoughts are brewing, though.

• Anyone remember weapons of mass destruction?
• At what point do people who oppose the war stop agreeing with the sentiment behind the expression "Support our troops"?
• Does anyone ever get fired in the Bush administration?
• Which of these is worse: stupidity, incompentence, dishonesty?

Posted by at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

From Wired: "What's Making Blognews lists the main stories making the rounds on political blogs. Unlike other meta sites like Blogdex or Daypop, What's Making Blognews concentrates only on political issues."

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It's kind of strange, in a good way, when my 12" world collides with the "real" one.

• Recognizing someone from the coffee shop.
• Realizing I was at the grand opening of the new location for Hammerpress at the same time as my favorite KC comic artist.
• Running into Heidi at said grand opening. We were standing next to each other for a good thirty seconds before I realized who I was standing next to. I would not have even known about Hammerpress were it not for Heidi's post and comment on the place.
• Singling out Brady Vest, Hammerpress proprietor, from the others in the impressive crowd because I'd seen his picture online in the Pitch article. We talked very briefly about the possibility of his involvement with one or more of my classes next year. Mr. Vest is very cool. I am a dork.

Posted by at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

L and I are travelling to San Francisco this week to attend a college graduation. Suggestions for graduation gifts are welcome. The graduate in question is an early-20s Peace Corps volunteer and talented musician.

Posted by at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A detailed program is available online.

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I'm using iTunes lately to listen to music on the computer. Maybe it's just my Mac lust kicking in, but I like it much better than Winamp or MusicMatch (and don't get me started on the annoying Realplayer). These players have very similar features, but I've been able to figure them out much more quickly on iTunes than on its competitors. One feature I like is the ability to export easily, as a text file, various playlists from your collection. Here's the "party shuffle" I'm listening to as I calculate semester grades.

Posted by at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I met David Daniell when he was a 19-year-old freshman at Georgia Tech, playing guitar in his first band at a house party just off campus. Now he has his own record label, Antiopic, which has just released a CD featuring members of Sonic f'ing Youth.

Last year, Antiopic released a monthly series of free, downloadable mp3s entitled Allegorical Power, a project exploring "the possibilities and roles of abstract or experimental music as social and political response."

Posted by at 9:51 AM | Permalink

I must say, I'm finding the name of this blog, begun in February of this year, awfully familiar.

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The site's not quite ready for primetime, but tonight I've been working on a page for the Shakespeare course that I mentioned over on Palimpsest.

Watch this space for more thoughts about the course to be posted.

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As the KCBloggers site notes, providing several relevant links, today is "is the one year anniversary of the worst tornado outbreak in US history, including nine twisters that tore through much of the western and northern portions of the Kansas City area." I wrote about it after it happened.

Weather forecast today predicts isolated thunderstorms with a high of 73. Right now outside my window it's bright but partly cloudy.

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Over lunch recently, Jeff mentioned the joke behind the title of Lynne Trusse's book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which goes a little something like this:

A panda bear walks into a bar and orders lunch. He sits quietly munching his food, and after he finishes he wipes his mouth with his napkin, pulls out a gun, fires into the ceiling and walks out.

"What was that all about?" the bartender asks the waiter.

"Oh, that's what a panda bear does. Eats, shoots and leaves."

(Obviously, this joke really only works when it's spoken: "eats, shoots and leaves" sounds just like "eats shoots and leaves.")

Later in the week, as we were talking about this joke and others of the [fill-in-the-blank]-walks-into-a-bar genre, I said that it seems to me that people don't really tell jokes so much anymore. I proposed a contest, or party game, in which people challenged each other with the front end of a joke, requiring the other participant to complete the joke. Whoever could do so in the shortest amount of time would win.

Jeff proposed, "A panda bear, a fox, and a gorilla walk into a bar."

I proposed, "A three-legged sled dog walks into a bar."

So, can you finish these jokes?

Posted by at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Last fall I started picking up the free copies of the locally produced comic "Sparrow's Fall" available at the Broadway Cafe. Somehow, I recently learned that the creator, Parrish Baker, has his own blog. You can read some of his work for yourself on this page and this page. I think it's great stuff.

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