thanks for not being a zombie

What you're looking at, dear reader, is a rather large piece of paper upon which rest several items (counter-clockwise from the top):

• A single signature made by folding the large piece of paper 4 times (thus it's been folded in sextodecimo to make 16 leaves), then stitching through the folds that will be facing the spine of the eventual book of which this signature will be a part. (See WikiPedia on bookbinding terms and techniques)
• A tool known as a bone-folder, which makes creating smooth folds easier - and reportedly, glue does not stick to it.
• An awl, which punches the holes through the paper, making stitching easier.
• Beeswax, to coat the thread and make it less likely to tangle.
• A needle and thread.

Not shown: the knife I used to trim the pages after folding and sewing them. You end up with many folds that prevent you from opening the pages, so you have to "trim" the paper along those folds. Try it: take a big piece of paper and fold it four times: horizontally, vertically, horizontally, vertically. See?

Yes, I went to bookmaking class tonight. No, it's not a class on how to take bets on the Superbowl.

Bonus Link! Check out Evil Rooster's Bookbinding Pages.

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

I saw myself in a dream,
and I just wanted to tell you,
Everything is all right.
-Velvet Underground, "Beginning to See the Light"

This body turns 38 today. Can that be right? Happy Birthday to me, to Mike, and to Johnny Rotten.

Posted by at 5:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Remember that scene in High Fidelity where Rob is organizing his music collection autobiographically...?

In the summer of 1989 I moved to Nashville to try to salvage a romantic relationship that died pretty much the day I arrived. This made for an interesting three months. In order to pay the rent I worked at a place called the Pasteria with several interesting coworkers, including one of the guitarists for a band called Rumble Circus, who were good but apparently never found much success. I probably have the details a bit wrong, but some of the members of Rumble Circus went on to join at least three Atlanta bands: the Black Crowes, Drivin' 'N' Cryin', and Mary My Hope.

The Black Crowes you have probably heard of as they had a few national hits over the years, and those of you in the Southeast probably know Drivin' 'n' Cryin'. Mary My Hope were a band that should have made a bigger splash than they did, frankly, but perhaps their timing was off. To me, they merged the aesthetics of '70s glam rock with the vision of self-styled prophets like Jim Morrison and Patti Smith. Their sound verged at times on heavy metal. Too many cooks spoil the soup? I don't know.

Fast forward a few years, and I'm sitting on the porch with Sheila Doyle, who had worked with me at the aforementioned photocopy place and who played violin for Big Fish Ensemble. We used to have lunch and play some songs together; one of them was Mary My Hope's "I'm Not Singing" (mp3, 5.7MB), which is one of the best tracks on the band's debut CD Museum. I can only remember doing this a few times, and I guess I talked myself into thinking I wasn't very good, but Sheila was always pretty happy about our informal collaborations. Once her boyfriend, BFE's drummer, came home and sang along with me on one song; I did a pretty good harmony vocal (he even said so).

I was never more than a satellite on the fringes of the margins of the periphery of the Atlanta music scene. But this is one of those moments in my life that I look back on and think, "Why did I quit doing that?"

I'm not sure that you can even buy Mary My Hope CDs anymore, but if you see one, be sure to take it home. I do know that singer James Hall has a release out on Daemon Records, and it looks like his current project is Pleasure Club.

MP3 files are posted for evaluation purposes only. Availability is limited: usually 24 hours. Through this site, I'm trying to share and promote good music with others, who will also hopefully continue to support these artists. Everyone is encouraged to purchase music and concert tickets for the artists you feel merit your hard earned dollars. If you hold copyright to one of these songs and would like the file removed, please let me know.

Posted by at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Inspired by Weez, I set myself up with Audioscrobbler. But my page remains blank, even though I've downloaded the iTunes plugin and everything.

Hmmm.

Posted by at 11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Via SHARP-L:

The latest issue of 'Quadrat' (the bulletin of research in progress on the history of the British book trade) is now available on-line (as a PDF) on the British Book Trade Index website.

Posted by at 9:11 PM | Permalink

Our first bookmaking class met last night, and I think I'm going to like it. Being a student is good practice for teachers.

We are free to pursue whatever projects we like. I guess I went in assuming we would be receiving specific assignments, so I've had to think through possibilities. What I've realized is that I'm really interested in fasteners: devices that are used to keep a book closed, whether that's a latch like on one of the Bibles I examined last summer, an elastic band like the one on my new little Moleskine notebook, or a cord like what's attached to the Tibetan notebook I bought over a year ago. What appeals to me about these devices? Perhaps it's the way in which they work against the familiar openess of books, acting as a kind of safeguard (even if only a symbolic one) against unauthorized uses.

I began to think, "What would it take to create an exact replica of one of these things?" Then I began to think, "What kinds of things did readers do with (or to) their books before they became so cheap and commonplace and before we had automated book production?" One of the above Bibles, for example, had been "hacked" at some point, by which I mean that someone took the traditionally bound Bible, split it in two, and then bound the two halves separately, but facing each other on a common backboard. The result was a book half as thick but twice as wide. My guess is that this alteration was done to fit into a particular pocket or satchel.

Users of electronic devices frequently hack them to see what kinds of non-authorized uses they can get out of them. As digital rights management technology gets more and more sophisticated (and as laws are passed to outlaw bypassing DRM), such hacking becomes more and more appealing, frankly.

Readers have long had the ability and inclination to alter their books, to make them say or do things other than what their creator intended. In some deep sense, this practice is perhaps a residue of oral culture, in which discourse exists only in conversation. Walter Ong calls writing "autonomous discourse" because it needs no interlocutor. In practice, however, we intervene in written discourse all the time, through writing marginal notes, underlining and highlighting key passages, and through altering the physical makeup of the book itself.

But how would history be different if the technology of the book had prevented such interventions? What if we were unable to try out new arrangements, to foreground different textual elements than those the author deemed most important?

Or to ask a question from a completely different angle: what elements of printed books might accurately be described (in a weird kind of back formation) as "analog rights management" features? How does the form of print seek to protect the integrity of the information it contains?

Posted by at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I want to be a good woman.
And I want for you to be a good man.
And this is why I am leaving.
And this is why I can't see you no more.
This is why I am lying
When I say, "I don't love you no more."
--Cat Power, "Good Woman"

Posted by at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I should be asleep, but some combination of getting up later than usual and having coffee at 5 this afternoon has resulted in insomnia. So you're getting your music early.

I worked the 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift at a 24-hour photocopy place in Atlanta for a good chunk of my college career. The guy who worked the graveyard shift was Glen Thrasher, who also published a 'zine called Lowlife and cohosted a show on WREK called "Destroy All Music." Glen struck me as grumpy but basically pretty nice, and he tried to clue my clueless self in to some local indie and avant-garde music. He played sporadically in a few different bands, including "I see the moon" and, I think, "Freedom Puff." I learned years later, after I'd moved to D.C., that he'd also played with Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power.

Then I read in Creative Loafing that in her younger years, Marshall had worked at a pizza place on Ponce de Leon in Atlanta that was like a second home to me. Perhaps she'd even served me a slice and a salad.

Marshall has developed a reputation for being absolutely horrible live, reportedly because she suffers from extreme stage fright. I've never seen her perform, so I can't say. I have listened to most of her recorded music, however, and it's really affecting and often disturbing. Somehow melodic and dissonant at the same time, usually midtempo or even quite slow.

I've picked one of the most accessible tracks off of her recent album, You are Free, because the lyrics just break my heart: "Good Woman" (mp3, 4.7MB)

Here's an iTunes list of Cat Power music.

I realize that this is not exactly the most obscure music selection, and you've probably heard of Cat Power already, haven't you, dear reader? The point is this: I'm not trying to play obscurantist bingo; I just want to share some music I really like, most of which is stuff I don't hear on the radio.

MP3 files are posted for evaluation purposes only. Availability is limited: usually 24 hours. Through this site, I'm trying to share and promote good music with others, who will also hopefully continue to support these artists. Everyone is encouraged to purchase music and concert tickets for the artists you feel merit your hard earned dollars. If you hold copyright to one of these songs and would like the file removed, please let me know.

Posted by at 12:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

A hilarious animation via SHARP=L.

Posted by at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Having solved the crises of world hunger, rampant poverty, global human rights abuses, and pharmaceuticals priced out of reach for most of the world's population, "conservative Christian groups accuse the makers of a video starring SpongeBob SquarePants, Barney and a host of other cartoon characters of promoting homosexuality to children."

Posted by at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

One of my colleagues tried to get the university library to scan some 19th-century documents to put online as part of her electronic reserves.

We can't do that. She was told. Someone may have bought the copyright.

No. No they may not have.

Posted by at 7:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Jack Kerouac: On the Road
January 19–March 13
North Gallery
University of Iowa Museum of Art

Known as “the Scroll,” the typescript for On the Road is 120 feet of continuous paper. The physical embodiment of Kerouac’s spontaneous writing method, the scroll is one of the most remarkable literary manuscripts in existence.

One of the key works of American literature and a turning point in 20th-century culture, the UIMA exhibition will be the first time the entire scroll has been publicly displayed.

Posted by at 7:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This link is a placeholder for me, but those of you working on academic monographs might find it useful, too.

Posted by at 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Since January 4, my blog ads have earned about $3, which is a small amount but not bad, frankly. How about you remember to click on an ad every once in awhile for a product that interests you? All proceeds are pledged to BlogAid.

Posted by at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today's a combination research/teaching prep day. I'm wrestling with some issues of language, history, and genre, so consider this entry an example of that wrestling. I hadn't really intended my original entry on blogging awards to spark such conversation; it was really just an offhand observation. But now I think it might help me think through some other issues.

Questions to consider:

• What makes a form of communication truly new?
• What makes a form of communication truly unique?

My stock answer is that no form of communication is ever truly new or truly unique. New forms tend to be conceived at first in terms of the old, as I've written before. And old forms are reconceived in the face of the new. Still, for whatever reason, I find myself arguing that we should reserve for blogging some unique features. In response to my blogging awards entry, Matt writes that he doesn't see my criterion of "the textual intervention of others" as key to the definition of blogging.

So what caused me to make that assertion? Well, when a bunch of us academic bloggers were asked about famous bloggers, like Wonkette, I responded, "Oh, that's not really blogging." And I still believe that. It's just the same old content you might find in, say, "The Reliable Source" in the Washington Post, but it's updated more frequently. If Wonkette is a blog, then when I pick up my phone and say "Breaker 1 9, I got a smokey on my tail" I'm using a CB Radio. If you channel old media content through a new media channel, is it new media? I say no. You might, however, think I'm wrong in characterizing Wonkette's content as old media.

In his comment, Matt writes,

To me, blogging is much more about the creation of a persona; all bloggers do this to an extent, even when they blog under a true name (like I do). The persona is created in all kinds of mundane ways I suspect we'd agree on--style and tone, subject matter, decisions about what to include or not to include, etc.

Fair enough, but there are many forms of writing through which a persona is created by these techniques: diaries, newspaper columns, first person fiction. So creating a persona is not unique to blogging, but I'm willing to admit that doing so is key to a good blog.

Matt goes on to list other features that "[facilitate] the construction of a recognizable persona":

• "its database back end (useful for sorting and searching entries)"
• "its date and time stamped organization"
• "peripherals such as blogrolls or bloglines (which situate the persona in a social network)"
• "Trackbacks and comments do this too of course, and they can be a powerful way of creating an identity for oneself online--but I don't see them as essential to [the] process, nor would I rush to privilege them more than other means."

First, why should we only note these features to the extent that they are involved in the creation of a persona? Second, I concede that the database backend that many (but not all) blogs have allows for multiple points of entry and rearrangement that are unique to this form of writing. Certainly there are other archives of text available via databases, but no other (that I can think of offhand) that features writing created specifically for that database--and in fact using the database as the word processor itself--by one or a small number of writers. Online news sources don't provide the same ease of searching and sorting, for example, and many websites published by newspapers are basically the print information put into HTML.

Date and time stamps? Been there. Done that.

Situating an author in a social network? Printed books have footnotes, cover blurbs, acknowledgments pages, and works cited pages that fulfill the same function.

Take the case of Justin Hall, who I know you've followed for a long while--many would cite him as the "first" blogger, but he did it all without *any* formal software, and with no comments, etc.

I first came across Hall about a year after he started. I would argue that he's in a class by himself, though, and not a representative blogger. Of course, he started using MovableType about two years ago.

They are seductive, though, those comments: the endorphin rush that comes from the contact can become an end in itself, I suspect, at least before one becomes jaded from the attention (that hasn't happened to me yet ;-).

Yeah, see? That's what I'm talkin' about. Comments/trackbacks are a vulnerability, and they do provide that rush as much from fear as from excitement.

But blogging is about masks and windows, a flirtation with self and other sustained through the rhythms of update, update, update--which play into our insatiable appetite for the new, the novel . . . with a touch of the voyeur, to keep us honest.

Word.

Posted by at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Growing up in a military family, I lived many different places over the years. The longest time my family ever lived anywhere was Mons, Belgium: 1979-1983. I've mentioned this here before, but I don't think I've mentioned some of the perhaps surprising parts of this experience.

First, in an age before the Internet and widespread European cable tv, we were a few years behind the times when it came to American culture. For example, I wore bell-bottoms much longer than I should have. I was still listening to '70s rock bands when people back home had moved on to New Wave. My family had a tiny black and white tv that only picked up one station: the Armed Forces Network. I think we watched maybe an hour or two a week of the meager offerings, which were usually a year or more old. We listened to AFN radio, too, which was a very eclectic mix (hour-by-hour) of pop, rock, and country...oh, and Paul Harvey.

In the northern half of Belgium Flemish is spoken while French is the language in the southern half, where we lived. For some reason, it was deemed a good idea when we arrived to put me immediately into a French language school as opposed to the American high school all my friends attended. Mind you, I didn't speak any French. I'm not entirely sure what the logic of that particular decision was, but it should come as no surprise to you that I did not do very well at math, Latin, social studies, and my other courses. Why? Because I didn't speak French. Yet the reaction of the adults in my life was that my failures in school were due to my bad attitude rather than to the experience of constantly listening to lectures and discussions that sounded like Qwerpoiua apodsq po poiasduq jpqpoi dkopqrq jkp. When I manage to remember in an affective way what that experience was like, I empathize with students who have learning disabilities or who are dealing with other crises in their lives that get in the way of understanding course material as easily as others do.

This was the year of the really bad stomachaches. I began to have my first inklings that adults were not all they're cracked up to be.

to be continued...

Posted by at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The Mundus Gateway is a web-based guide to more than four hundred collections of overseas missionary materials held in the United Kingdom. These materials, comprising the archives of British missionary societies, collections of personal papers, printed matter, photographs, other visual materials and artefacts, are held in a large number of libraries, record offices and other institutions in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The Mundus Gateway makes it easier for researchers to locate these collections and obtain sufficient information about their contents to enable effective planning of research visits.

Of particular interest to my research: (Wesleyan) Methodist Missionary Society

Posted by at 3:00 PM | Permalink

An email interview with one of my former professors regarding his recently published The Well-Made Book: Essays and Lectures by Daniel Berkeley Updike.

Posted by at 1:45 PM | Permalink

Clearing out my inbox, I came across an email I sent to a friend and wanted to capture it here before I deleted it.

About electronic texts, I immediately thought of Susan Hockey's
Electronic Texts in the Humanities: Principles and Practice (Oxford UP, 2001). In general, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has developed the definitive guidelines for marking up text. I asked L and one of my computing colleagues (Jeff Rydberg-Cox) for suggestions in response to your question.

Jeff wrote, "What about the bibliography at http://www.tei-c.org/Tutorials/ ? I have always liked the 'Gentle Introduction' that is the first one and the TEI-Lite tutorial (#2 on that page) is pretty good too."

L says word on the street is that this is good: "Creating and Documenting Electronic Texts: A Guide to Good Practice" http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/documents/creating/

The MLA has "Guidelines for Electronic Scholary Editions" http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/MLA/intro.html

In the end, the tricky part about using TEI guidelines for XML markup is how to get the documents into a web-viewable format. You can transform the XML into HTML using XSLT, but this process is right outside my sphere of expertise at the moment. My opinion is that if one follows all the best practices for transcription and basic editing, and then marks up the text in valid HTML (or XHTML, which is practically the same thing), then the documents are good enough for teaching.

I've been daydreaming about some kind of central repository for collaboratively created electronic texts (like Project Gutenberg, but a litte more focussed) that could be used for teaching purposes, even if they do not quite meet the needs of scholars who want rigidly accurate editions and electronic editions suitable for automated analysis. One of these days I'm going to try to create a framework for it.

Posted by at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

If you have access to a library with the journal Oxford Literary Review, could you do me a favor? I am reading "Technology Inside: Enlightent and Romantic Assumptions of the Orality/Literacy School" by Timothy Clark (1999) 21:57-72.

My library's ILL department provided me with an electronic (scanned) copy of this article, but the scan lacks pages 58 & 59. I'll ask them to fix the problem, of course, but in the interests of time perhaps someone could photocopy (or scan) those two pages and fax (or email) them to me. If this doesn't inconvenience you terribly, please email me to let me know, and I'll send you the fax number.

Thanks ever so much.

Posted by at 10:30 AM | Permalink

Inspired by JdoubleP's example, I thought I'd put a little more prose into these music-sharing entries.

I really missed the boat with the Clash. I had a chance to go see them live in the early 1980s, and I declined. All I had ever heard from them were the handful of tracks that made it to the radio, and those didn't really appeal to me. Years later, however, London Calling would be playing over and over as we edited the college newspaper all night on deadline. I could listen to that album forever.

When Joe Strummer died in late 2003, I decided I should go out and buy a copy of one of his recent albums: Global a Go-Go, which he recorded with a new band called The Mescaleros. My favorite track has to be the one I include below because it's a celebration of the multicultural carnival one finds in more and more of the world.

Spoken: So anyway, I told him I was in a band. He said, "Oh yeah, oh yeah - what's your music like?" I said, "It's um, um, well, it's kinda like...You know, it's got a bit of, um, you know."

Sung:Ragga, Bhangra, two-step Tanga
Mini-cab radio, music on the go
Surfbeat, backbeat, frontbeat, backseat
There's a bunch of players and they're really letting go
We got, Brit pop, hip hop, rockabilly, Lindy hop
Gaelic heavy metal fans fighting in the road
Sunday boozers for chewing gum users
They got a crazy D.J. and she's really letting go

For your temporary listening pleasure: Bhindi Bhagee (mp3, 6.8M)

• Look for these albums, too: Streetcore and Rock Art and the X-Ray Style.
• Here's an iTunes list of music from Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros.

MP3 files are posted for evaluation purposes only. Availability is limited: usually 24 hours. Through this site, I'm trying to share and promote good music with others, who will also hopefully continue to support these artists. Everyone is encouraged to purchase music and concert tickets for the artists you feel merit your hard earned dollars. If you hold copyright to one of these songs and would like the file removed, please let me know.

Posted by at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Increasingly, the term "History of the Book" (aka "Book History") appears inadequate to describe the varied scholarly work that is actually taking place under this rubric, and much related work is unnecessarily excluded. The title of my course last semester was "Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing," which was cribbed and altered from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (altered because not all writing could be accurately described as "authorship"). But such a phrase is unattractively long and not at all sexy.

One of the problems with the term "Book History" is that we romanticize far too much the technology of the "book" (a problematic term itself, conjuring images of the codex to the exclusion of other printed forms), and this romanticizing blinds us to its unique (even unusual or impractical) features while also causing us to ignore evidence of other forms of communication, such as the world of orality and aurality, and their influence upon literate practices.

One of my lines of argument to establish exigence in my courses goes like this:

• Humans have been around for many thousands of years.
• We date the earliest evidence of writing to approximately 6,000 years ago.
• Print was developed even more recently than that, and in the West, just a few hundred years ago.
• While scholars disagree about how best to measure the ability to read and write, there is a general consensus that widespread literacy is a very recent phenomenon.

If we take a progressive, teleological view of history, then yes, the "book" deserves to be the center of attention: what comes more recently is obviously the best of what we are yet capable of creating. But if we have a more objective view, then we note that the "book" is barely a blip on the radar screen of human history, and that it brings with it as many limitations as it does strengths. The lamentations over the competition for our attention presented by electronic media seem silly in this light. As D. F. McKenzie and Adam Fox have shown, no medium has ever existed without its uses and meaning being altered by other media. Of course, as new media have appeared, they have often produced strong cultural anxieties. We fret over the Internet and videogames: three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope worried about the widespread availability of print.

These musings were sparked by an announcement from HoBo that led me to this website:

Centre for Manuscript and Print studies at the Institute of English Studies (London)

A new research centre created from the merger of the Centre for Palaeography and the Research Centre in the History of the Book

Palaeography, Codicology, Diplomatic and Calligraphy; History of Printing; Manuscript and Print Relations; History of Publishing and the Book Trade; Ephemera Studies; History of Reading; History of Libraries, Collecting and Scholarship; Analytical, Descriptive, and Historical Bibliography; Textual Criticism and Textual Theory; The Electronic Book

The list of areas of study is appealing and could be greatly expanded. For one thing, what about speaking & listening and their relationship to the creation, distribution, and reception of written or printed material? I don't mean to suggest that the design of this center is flawed, just that the question of what constitutes "book history" is much more vexed than it appears at first.

On the other hand, any field of study has to have a center...right? What's the more expanded version of a counter-argument to what I've written above?

Posted by at 7:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

From Ian Gadd on SHARP-L:

As some of you will know, HoBo is a website that provides information about forthcoming history of the book conferences, seminars and lectures in the UK (and to a lesser extent abroad). As the site is updated every week, I have been thinking about ways of informing regular visitors about updates without them having to visit the site each week. As a result, I have added an 'RSS newsfeed' for HoBo; its URL is http://users.ox.ac.uk/~hobo/hobo/hobo.rss. If you 'subscribe' to this, brief details of all recent updates to HoBo will automatically be listed in your RSS 'reader'. (HoBo itself is unchanged and you can continue to consult it as normal whether or not you subscribe to the RSS feed.)

Posted by at 6:10 PM | Permalink

Here's something a little OCD about me: Whenever I take a stack of books back to the library, I record them in a little list because I'm afraid I haven't gotten everything out of them and might need to go back and reread them.

I almost never reread them, of course.

• Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do
• Bernard Bergonzi, Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture
• Michael Berube, The Employment of English
• Robert Boice, Professors as Writers
• William E. Cain (ed), Teaching the Conflicts
• Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academe
• ---, Beyond the Culture Wars
• Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (ed), Redrawing the Boundaries
• Robert Bechtold Heilman, The Professor and the Profession
• Thomas P. Miller, The Formation of College English
• Isaiah Smithson and Nancy Ruff (ed), English Studies / Culture Studies

Posted by at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I alluded to my frustrations in an earlier post. I'll share one of them with you now.

Like many universities, mine has a research grant program for faculty. We can apply for a few thousand dollars in an application process that is judged by a committee of other faculty from across the disciplines. I've applied three times for this grant unsuccessfully. That would be frustrating enough, but here's how the three applications went down:

1. First application: I was told that it was very good, particularly the explanation of the relationship of my work to work being done in the field, but that the explanation of my methodology was deemed "too subjective."
2. Second application: I was told that it was very good, particularly my revised methodology explanation, but that the weak part was the explanation of the relationship of my work to work being done in the field. However, this explanation was unchanged from the previous attempt, when I was told that it was a strength of the application.
3. Third application: I was given no reason why my application was rejected, but I was told that there had been a "problem" in the review process.

None of this feedback is given in writing. I don't know why. Furthermore, I am only allowed three applications for a particular project, so now I can either craft an application for a different project (even though my research for this one is not done), or I can make any future applications look like they are for a different project.

I am not a perfect scholar, and I'm not burning up the publishing track, but whenever I go to national and international conferences, scholars from other institutions express enthusiasm and admiration for my research. At my own institution, however, it sometimes feels as if I'm invisible.

Posted by at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

...is probably my favorite image transformation that you can view here.

Posted by at 6:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This entry is a list of books I gleaned from the catalogs at MLA 2004. Some might help me with my own research, some might be good for teaching, and some just sound interesting.

This one is at the top of my list, at the moment: Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century, edited by John Bender and Michael Marrinan (Stanford UP, 2005). The publisher's blurb reads, "Regimes of Description responds to the perception—however imprecise—that forms of knowledge in every sector of contemporary culture are being fundamentally reshaped by the digital revolution."

University of Minnesota Press

Kevin Kopelson, Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer's Desk
Lowell Handler, Twitch and Shout: A Touretter's Tale
Aden Evens, Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience
Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation
Catherine Liu, Copying Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton
Richard Feldstein, Political Correctness: A Response from the Cultural Left

Blackwell Publishing

Cultural Studies: From Theory to Actions, edited by Pepi Leistyna
New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, & Meaghan Morris
The Question of Method in Cultural Studies, edited by James Schwoch, Mimi White, & Dilip Goankar
Creative Industries, edited by John Hartley
A Companion to Cultural Studies, edited by Toby Miller
The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, edited by Michael Berube
A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, edited by Michael Payne
Media and Cultural Studies (2nd ed), edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham & Douglas M. Kellner
Re-reading Popular Culture, by Joke Hermes
A Companion to Media Studies, edited by Angharad N. Valdivia
John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization
Popular Culture: Production and Consumption, edited by Lee Harrington and Denise Bielby
Hanno Hardt, Myths for the Masses: An Essay on Mass Communication

NYU Press

Alec McHoul, A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power, and the Subject Glenn W. Shuck, The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity Janet Staiger, Media Reception Studies

Oxford University Press

Interpreting Everyday Culture, edited by Fran Martin D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England Paul Baines, The Long Eighteenth Century Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of Whig Literary Culture, 1681-1714

University of Virginia Press

James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield, Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money
William G. Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil, and Eugene M. Tobin, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education

University of Chicago Press

Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s [excerpted online]

Stanford University Press

William Blake: The Painter at Work, edited by Joyce H. Townsend Richard Swedborg, The Max Weber Dictionary: Key Words and Central Concepts Bethany Bryson, Making Multiculturalism: Boundaries and Meaning in U.S. English Departments Adriana Caverero (translated, and with an introduction by Paul A. Kottman), For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression Peggy Kamuf, Book of Addresses

Columbia University Press

Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogues

University of Pennsylvania Press

Hugh Amory, Bibliography and the Book Trades: Studies in the Print Culture of Early New England (edited by David D. Hall) Jody Greene, The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660-1730 David A. Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 1726-1825

Posted by at 7:20 AM | Permalink

I've noticed that various blog award competitions are underway, and I have to admit that I haven't paid close enough attention to understand how these awards are decided. However, I have been thinking about what kinds of criteria one might use to judge good and bad blogging.

During this conversation, I said that one of the key characteristics of a blog is that it is vulnerable to the textual intervention of others. If what you write online is not, then you're not really writing a blog. You might be an amusing columnist using blog software, but you're not a blogger. You might be a talented essayist using blog software, but you're not a blogger. And while I am on this particular soapbox...

• If you don't allow comments and trackbacks, then you're not a very good blogger. (Restating the above point.)
• If you (like me) don't interact much with the people who leave comments on your site, then you're not a very good blogger.
• If you (like me) don't leave a great many comments on other people's blogs, then you're not a very good blogger.
• If you don't rely for rhetorical or stylistic punch now and then on the surprise waiting at the other end of an otherwise innocent looking hyperlink, then you're not a very good blogger. Hypertext != print.

Being a good writer is not necessarily the same thing as being a good blogger, although the two categories are not mutually exlusive.

Posted by at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Neko Case, "I Wish I Was the Moon Tonight" (mp3, 4M) from Blacklisted

• Look for these albums
  • The Tigers Have Spoken (two mp3s, "If You Knew" and "Train from Kansas City," available as free downloads from record label.)
  • Blacklisted (RealMedia file: "Things That Scare Me Not")
  • Furnace Room Lullaby (RealMedia file: "Mood to Burn Bridges")
  • The Virginian (RealMedia file: "Karoline")
• Music preview of Blacklisted at Salon.com
• Review of Furnace Room Lullaby at Salon.com
• Official website (no, really)
• Relevant page at the company that represents her (includes upcoming tour dates)
• Allmusic entry
• Here's an iTunes list of Case music.

MP3 files are posted for evaluation purposes only. Availability is limited: usually 24 hours. Through this site, I'm trying to share and promote good music with others, who will also hopefully continue to support these artists. Everyone is encouraged to purchase music and concert tickets for the artists you feel merit your hard earned dollars. If you hold copyright to one of these songs and would like the file removed, please let me know.

Posted by at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

There's a stack of books by the bed that I'll be tackling as my late-night reading this semester, starting with...

Whitney Terrell, The Huntsman
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex: A Novel
Chang Rae Lee, Aloft
Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Posted by at 7:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Did you already notice these changes, dear reader?

My old blog design had tons of links to other blogs right on the home page. Now, however, I've put everything into my Bloglines subscriptions, to which I've provided a link on the right-hand side of the home page under "About You."

I've also been maintaining a side blog called "Clip Job," and you'll find a link to it right below the other oone.

Posted by at 7:56 AM | Permalink

Reality television continues to astound me:

• Having met on the set of American series The Surreal Life, Brigitte Nielsen and Flavor Flav are now romantically involved and have their own reality show, which starts tonight on VH-1. [NY Times story]
• Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Germaine freakin' Greer is on the latest season of Britain's Celebrity Big Brother, which also features Nielsen. [Guardian story]

Posted by at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

• Do I owe you a blog entry? Definitely.
• Do I owe you an email? Probably.
• Do I owe you revisions on an article? All signs point to yes.

We returned from our sojourns and then entertained houseguests for a few days. So now I really have to hotfoot it to get ready for the semester. In lieu of a real blog entry, here are a few unrelated factoids for your consumption regarding developments Chez Zombie:

• It appears that whenever someone clicks on one of the ads I now have on my archive pages, 5 cents goes into my account for BlogAid. Keep that in mind, kids.
• When I mentioned earlier that "[m]y mp3 collection is growing by leaps and bounds," what I should have said was, "I have acquired more new music in two days than I usually get in a year."
• We are making the spare bedroom into a serious, get-work-done office for both of us. Almost there.
• Now that Max is gone, I plan to start volunteering for Wayside Waifs soon. They had a volunteer orientation scheduled for tonight, but it was cancelled due to all the snow and ice on the roads.
• The above development means we get to watch the latest (taped) episodes of Lost and Alias tonight.
• As soon as I get my bedside table and lamp, I'm seriously cutting back on the late-night blog reading. I mean it this time. No, really.

Posted by at 2:30 PM | Permalink

Okay, without asking Jason's permission (and I hope it's okay), I've added Google Adsense ads to my website. Why? All money earned from these ads will go towards tsunami relief efforts as part of BlogAid. Money is generated when users click through ads for products that they are interested in. I don't know how much money these ads will generate, but it doesn't hurt to try.

Posted by at 8:19 PM | Permalink

Let's see if this tradition lasts: each Monday morning I'll post an mp3 or I'll post a link to an mp3 out there on the web. The stuff that I probably shouldn't be posting will be removed after 24 hours. I'll focus on independent music, stuff you're less likely to hear through the mainstream media. This morning there's a bumper crop.

• Richard Buckner, "Pull" (mp3, 3M) from Devotion & Doubt.
  • Allmusic Guide entry
  • Buckner's current record label page
  • Official website
• Chuck notes that you can download the original music from the film Tarnation for free.
• Drag City is offering a couple of free downloads right now:
• "Home," by Six Organs of Admittance
• "My Home is the Sea (live acoustic)," by Bonny Billy and Matt Sweeney

MP3 files are posted for evaluation purposes only. Through this site, I'm trying to share and promote good music with others, who will also hopefully continue to support these artists. Everyone is encouraged to purchase music and concert tickets for the artists you feel merit your hard earned dollars. If you hold copyright to one of these songs and would like the file removed, please let me know. Availability is limited.

Posted by at 7:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

A field of study popped up on my radar screen recently: soundscape studies. I'm not exactly sure how or if this field might be relevant to my work on orality and literacy, but I'm going to investigate. I heard the term while attending a great panel in Philadelphia at MLA 2004:

Sounds in the Eighteenth-Century City

1. “Mother Shipton Speaks: Sounding Oracles in Eighteenth-Century Print Culture,” Laura E. McGrane, Haverford Coll.
2. “Pope, Print, and the ‘Wond’rous Pow’r of Noise,’” Paula J. McDowell, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick
3. “Sounds in the Theater,” Paula R. Backscheider, Auburn Univ., Auburn

All three papers were great but the one by Paula McDowell was particularly interesting to me. (Full disclosure: McDowell was on my dissertation committee.) If I followed her talk correctly, her current book project, Fugitive Voices: Literature and Oral Culture in Eighteenth-Century England, traces attitudes towards oral traditions from the late seventeenth through the late eighteenth century in England. While we find a skeptical, or even antagonistic, attitude towards oral traditions in earlier writers such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, there is a more nostalgic view in place by the time we get to James MacPherson and William Wordsworth. In short, McDowell is researching the ways in which our current attitudes towards orality and literacy developed, including the invention of such concepts as "oral tradition" and "oral culture." This is, it seems to me, extremely important work that is not only carefully researched and deeply historicized but understandable by the layperson.

Too bad some reporters cannot be persuaded to leave the confines of the newsroom in order to actually see what's going on at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, offering their readers instead a tired retread of stereotypes and uninformed sniping.

Posted by at 10:30 AM | Permalink

Posted by at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

May 2005 be better than 2004 for all of us.

Last night we enjoyed a dinner of Thai food, then some tea at a friend's apartment, then home for a quiet midnight and a glass of 18-year-old, single malt Scotch.

My most memorable new year's eve was in Naples, Italy in the late 1980s. I was home from college and my family went to a party at a house that overlooked the Mediterranean. To welcome the new at midnight, the Neapolitans threw out the old...literally. Glasses, dishes, chairs, couches, dishwashers, unwanted grandmothers(*): they all went flying out of windows as fireworks flew into the air in long arcs that ended on rooftops, setting the city on fire.

Driving home was like driving through a war zone. It remains one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

* not really

Posted by at 12:00 PM | Permalink