thanks for not being a zombie

Posted by at 5:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

At first, I thought I'd just send this to the people who received grits. However, I've decided to post the information for everyone. Credit goes to L's sister for providing these.

In the interests of time, you may want to fake the shrimp stock.

In the interests of health, you may want to adjust some of the ingredients.

Shrimp-n-Grits
Yield: 2 servings

1/2 lb unpeeled, med fresh shrimp
1/2 lb andouille sausage (or similarly spicy sausage)
2 T lemon juice
1/4 t salt
1/8 t ground red pepper
1/4 c finely chopped onion
1/3 c finely chopped green pepper
2 T all-purpose flour
3/4 shrimp stock (recipe follows)
creamy grits (recipe follows)
garnishes: green pepper slices, fresh lemon slices

Peel and devein shrimp. Combine shrimp, lemon juice, salt, and red pepper in a small bowl; set aside.

Brown sausage in skillet and save 3 tablespoons of the drippings.

Cook onion and green pepper in sausage drippings in a large skillet over med-hi heat, stirring constantly, about 10 minutes. Sprinkle flour over vegetables; cook, stirring constantly, about 2 minutes or until flour begins to brown. Add sausage, shrimp, and shrimp stock (see blow); cook, stirring constantly, 2 to 3 minutes or until shrimp turns pink and gravy is smooth. Add water or additional stock, if gravy is too thick. Serve immediately over Creamy Grits (see below). Add garnishes, if desired.

2 lbs unpeeled, med fresh shrimp with heads
3 qts water
1 large carrot
2 stalks celery, quartered
1 med onion, quartered
1/2 c fresh thyme with stems
1/2 c fresh parsley sprigs
1/2 c fresh basil leaves
1/2 c fresh oregano with stems
1 T dried savory

Remove heads and peel shrimp; place heads and shells in a large Dutch oven, reserving shrimp for other uses. Add remaining ingredients; bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, 45 minutes. Pour mixture through a wire-mesh strainer into a container, discarding solids. Reserve desired amount and freeze remaining stock for other uses.

2 c water
2 T butter
1/2 c regular or stone-ground grits
1 c half-n-half or whipping cream, divided

Bring water and butter to a boil in a heavy saucepan. Stir in grits; return to a boil over medium heat. Reduce heat and cook, stirring occasionally, 10 minutes or until grits are thick. Stir in 1/2 c half-n-half; simmer 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add remaining 1/2 c half-n-half; simmer 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Serve immediately.

Posted by at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

And at the last minute, too. Apparently, there was a scheduling conflict at the hospital.

We're very grateful for all of your good wishes!

Posted by at 2:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Two of the dominant research interests guiding me right now are book history and the history of sound. What a coincidence, then, that the Macarthur Foundation has just awarded grants to

• Terry Belanger and
• Emily Thompson.

I'll get mine, yet!

Posted by at 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm not a crypto-blogger, when it comes to my own life, but I do not blog other people's lives. Here's what I feel right about telling you:

• I'm in Newnan, Georgia for around a month or so, during which time I'll probably make short trips back home to be with L.
• The surgery in question is the replacement of a heart valve.
• I'll be a key part of the support system during the recovery process: cooking, cleaning, cat care, company.
• There are four cats eager to be guest bloggers.
• Internet access is dodgy. I'm currently posting from Starbucks.

Those of you inclined to send good wishes and positive energy are encouraged to do so.

Posted by at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

In order not to hijack the comments thread at The Valve, I'm writing a longish post below in response to CR's comments. (See also this post chez Acephalous.)

Do editions matter?

Is creating an edition important scholarly work that has an impact on the culture at large? Here's a test. Go to any "big-box" bookseller and look in their "classics," "literature", or "African-American studies" sections. I guarantee you that 9 times out of 10, Vincent Carretta's edition of Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative will be there. It's gone through two editions and many, many printings.

Do editions influence our understanding of literature and literary history? Yes. The four best-selling novels of the first half of the eighteenth century were Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Love in Excess, and Pamela (the latter of which blew the doors off, in terms of sales, what publishers had ever expected to sell on the fiction market). One of these four novels was written by a woman. One of these four novels was not available in a modern edition until the 1990s. Guess which one? Without Love in Excess on the syllabus, students of genre have an inaccurate understanding of how the novel developed.

Is literary scholarship that is dependent upon historical research boring and esoteric?

Vin Carretta's work on Olaudah Equiano's birthplace has the potential to change dramatically the landscape of African-American studies. Because I am not an expert in the field, I make no predictions over whether it will or not. Equiano's Interesting Narrative has long been considered the first slave narrative. It is a foundational text of the African-American literary tradition. The debate about whether, as Eqiuano claims, he was really born in Africa (and so really provides the only first-person account in existence of what it was like to endure the middle passage) is extremely important, as any elementary school student would be able to perceive. If you are looking for an example of nitpicky, esoteric work, this is not it.

Textual Studies vs. Theory?

The claims of a divide between those who want to nitpick over insignificant textual details and those who want to make grander claims about history, culture, literature, or theory were undone in the 1980s by Jerome McGann (in A Critique of Modern Textual Critism) and D. F. McKenzie (in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts). Most recently, the work of Roger Chartier is an eloquent mixture of theory, history, and textual studies. See, for example, Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer and The Order of Books.

Are any scholars publishing work that is accessible to "non-initiates"?

I'll name three works, all available in paperback, all making a splash among scholars, all selling well to "non-initiates," and all reviewed in the mainstream press:

• Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 1999 (Current Amazon sales rank: 37,180)
• Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World, 2004 (Current Amazon sales rank: 2,166)
• Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All, 2005 (Current Amazon sales rank: 17,398)

There's always a risk in citing particular examples to disagree with someone who refuses to cite particular examples of their own. That risk is the response of "Oh, well that's not what I'm talking about." If that's the case, fine, I'll repeat my question: What are you talking about?

Posted by at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Murray Schafer, from "Open Ears" (in 2003's The Auditory Culture Reader):

The Latin word audire (to hear) has many derivations. One may have an 'audience' with the king--that is, a chance to have him hear your petitions. One's financial affairs are 'audited' by an accountant, because originally accounts were read aloud for clarity. An accused person is given a 'hearing,' that is, a chance for the accused and witnesses to offer aural testimony in the courtroom. Of course, rooms are often constructed or appointed to favour the transmission of some voices over others, and the courtroom, like the royal court, is no exception, with the judge as the king occupying the most elevated position, reminding us that the Latin word obaudire meant 'hearing from below'--obeying. Similar relationships have been noticed in other languages, for instance in German, where horen (to hear) is also the root of gehoren (to belong to) and gehorchen (to obey). We hear sound. We belong to sound. We obey sound. (30).

Posted by at 9:56 AM | Permalink

Roger Chartier, from "Representations of the Written Word" (in 1995's Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer):

The revolution of the electronic text will also be a revolution in reading. To read on a screen is not to read in a codex. The electronic representation of texts completely changes the text's status; for the materiality of the book, it substitutes the immateriality of texts without a unique location; against the relations of contiguity established in the print objects, it opposes the free composition of infinitely manipulable fragments; in place of the immediate apprehension of the whole work, made visible by the object that embodies it, it introduces a lengthy navigation in textual archipelagos that have neither shores nor borders. Such changes inevitably, imperatively require new ways of reading, new relationships to the written word, new intellectual techniques. While earlier revolutions in reading took place without changing the fundamental structure of the book, such will not be the case in our own world. The revolution that has begun is, above all, a revolution in the media and forms that transmit the written word. In this sense, the present revolution has only one precedent in the West: the substitution of the codex for the volumen--of the book composed of quires for the book in the form of a roll--during the first centuries of the Christian era. (18).

Posted by at 9:52 AM | Permalink

I'll be away from home for a few weeks, taking care of a family member who is having major surgery on Tuesday. I don't know what my Internet access will be like, so I don't know what my blogging will be like. I'll probably do some audio blogging here from time to time.

There will be cats and, eventually, cat pictures. So there's that.

Now, a friend of mine is trying to set up either Drupal or MovableType on a Neural.com account and is having some difficulty. Can anyone help him out with advice or assistance? If so, please leave your email address for him in the comments to this post.

I'm off with a trunk full of books and my laptop. For now, adieu.

Posted by at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The White House Proclamation can be read here.

Prayer: "The Lord's Prayer," read by William S. Burroughs with aural accompaniment by Sonic Youth (from Dead City Radio).

Remembrance: "Opening," composed by Phillip Glass, conducted by Michael Riesman (from the soundtrack to Mishima).

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 11:16 AM | Permalink

Well, it's a lot, but I think I can do it...

• Two hours. Work uninterrupted on the article that is nearly complete: the overall structure is done; I need to fill in all the details, format the citations, smooth out the transitions, polish the intro and conclusion. Start by looking over what I have, then making notes on work to get done. Jump in to the editing and writing. Then finish by making notes on what to do tomorrow.
• Two hours. Read the latest issue of the Top Journal in My Field, and consider whether the article should be sent there. I was IM'ing with a distant friend who has published in said journal, and she encouraged me to send it there. If nothing else, they have a decent turnaround time. I've already decided on the next two journals if TJiMF turns me down. I dread cranky readers' reports, though. The earlier version of this article was criticized for getting key factual claims wrong, but it was the reader (and not me) who had those facts wrong. Dude, I've looked at the primary documents, and I know what I'm talking about. I've been going to the gym for months, and you're not gonna kick sand in my face anymore!
• One hour. Freewrite new stuff related to preaching and eighteenth-century auditory culture.
• One hour (?). Wrap up some loose ends from last semester's teaching.
• One hour (?). Answer the emails that I have been ignoring from people at my home institution.
• One hour (?). Work with MovableType to see if I can pull off the category-specific RSS feeds. Also, add category links to each blog entry and add links to specific comments, both of which features were lost when I change the layout at the beginning of the year.
• One hour (?). Run errands: post office & drycleaning.
• 30 minutes (?). Phone call with my dad about upcoming trip to Vietnam.

Posted by at 9:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

...and hosted by Respectful Insolence (a.k.a. "Orac Knows").

Posted by at 8:27 AM | Permalink

Lots of people lately are blogging about the process of writing. One common thread is that you need to write at least a little bit every day in order to be productive.

• Joe confronts his writer's block daily.
• Mel explains that in her pre-tenure days, "I could not approach my writing as a space of freedom or exploration because I felt so constrained by institutional expectations."
• Katrina-blogging led to some insights for Kathleen: "the more I wrote, the more I found worth writing about." Collin responds to and expands on this post by pointing out the value of blogging as a daily, disciplined, exploratory practice, which leads Kathleen to more observations.
• The Academic Coach shares advice from Tara Gray: "Write Daily. Share Weekly."
• Nels finds that a coffeeshop and timed writing can lead to productivity, and I suspect he's not alone.

It's a good thing for writers to share their experience of writing, because I suspect that for most of us it's pretty damn hard. It's reassuring to know that we're not alone in the struggle. When academic (and non-academic) bloggers write about these things, it not only makes us reflect upon our own teaching practices--which almost inevitably involve teaching writing--but it also demonstrates to the students who read our blogs that we are engaged in the struggle, too. There's no magic pill that makes writing effortless: it's work.

I had to pull myself out of the blogging path I was starting because it was not helping me get done the work I need to get done this semester. The increase in readers (my traffic more than doubled) and the feeling that I was writing about something important were both addictive, but in the end, that's not why I'm here.

Disciplining myself to instead write a blog entry about the study of sound was much more helpful because explaining my research to a general (though mostly academic) blog-reading audience requires me to understand what's at issue for me. Additionally, not only did it get me back to thinking more fully and more richly about my research, but it also garnered two responses in just a few hours.

I realize now, living a thousand miles away from my job for a semester, that the "institutional expectations" mentioned by Mel have kept me frozen in fear and hesitation. In particular, being told again and again and again by my university's grant-awarding program that what I am on working just isn't up to snuff kept me in an unproductive spiral of worry. However, when the National Endowment for the Humanities told me something different, I began to realize that perhaps the problem is not with me.

I think that overcoming the anxiety of these expectations has to involve putting them out of your head and connecting yourself, psychologically and literally, to a wider group of scholars than the ones at your home institution. This is one of the valuable things about academic conferences. And about academic blogging. If I get two responses to a blog entry on my research so quickly, that's likely to catapult me into a productive afternoon at my own local coffeeshop.

There are a few gaps between academic blogging and academic publishing, though:

1. The length of your average blog entry is much, much shorter than an article or a book chapter. So how does one translate blogging the research into writing an article or chapter?
2. Second, the pace of feedback in academic publishing is practically glacial. So how do you ignore the addictive qualities of instant feedback for the delayed gratification of print publication?
3. Third, blogging does not involve much, if any, revision. Most of my non-blog writing lately is revision and expansion of things I've already written (though much of that expansion is brand! new! stuff!). So how do you simultaneously embrace the discipline of daily writing and the necessity of constant editing and revision?

Dear reader, I welcome--nay, I long for--your thoughts on these questions.

Posted by at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Sometimes it feels like we wake up every morning only to have the same arguments over and over and over again as if the arguments we had yesterday had never happened.

Case in point: John Unsworth's 1994 essay, "Electronic Scholarship or, Scholarly Publishing and the Public," should be required reading for any future columnists who want to address academic blogging in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In many quarters of our profession, and among some of its immediate neighbors, the electronification of scholarly communication has become the occasion of more than a little anxiety over the past five or six years. This gradual but apparently inevitable change in the way we go about our business is affecting scholars and students in many different disciplines of the humanities and the sciences, as well as academic and commercial publishers, tenure-committees, university administrators, MLA policy-makers, private and government funding agencies, and librarians. The change that is taking place has profound implications, implications that are ethical and philosophical, economic, formal and generic, legal, and--sometimes overwhelmingly--practical and procedural.

Our responses to this change and its implications have covered the full range from despair to rejoicing, but for the most part they have focused on the local effects of the situation, rather than on understanding our circumstances as a limited and special case of a much more general shift in the culture as a whole. With few exceptions, academics have not successfully addressed the public on the more global effects of computers, networks, and electronic communication, and where they have, their discourse has generally fallen prey to the impulse to celebrate or to condemn the imagined, rather than to analyze or even extrapolate from the real.

People, he wrote this in 1994. It's one thing to disagree with what scholars have been saying about electronic communication and academia for well over a decade. It's another thing altogether to just ignore--a la Ivan Tribble--what they've said.

Posted by at 8:19 AM | Permalink

"I'm thinkin' about my doorbell./ When ya gonna ring it?"
    -The White Stripes, "My Doorbell" (Get Behind Me Satan)

"Indeed, if we listen to it the landscape is not so much a static topography that can be mapped and drawn, as a fluid and changing surface that is transformed as it is enveloped by different sounds."
    -Michael Bull and Les Back, "Introduction: Into Sound" (The Auditory Culture Reader)

Sound has been on my mind lately as I make my way through some soundscape scholarship. Jason J linked to a NYT review of John M. Picker's Victorian Soundscapes back in December, and soon thereafter I saw a panel at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association that piqued my interest. (Is "saw a panel" the right expression? Should that be "heard a panel"?) Because the people I study were renowned for nothing if not being noisy, this is not a field I can afford to ignore.

How did history sound? The question is not so banal as it might first appear. For example, when we think of "literature" now we think for the most part of silent readers occupied, to use Benedict Anderson's memorable phrase, "in the lair of the skull." However, many genres were and are meant to be spoken or sung: the epic, the ballad, the sermon, the play. And many readers read aloud, even long after words began to be written down with spaces between them in order to facilitate silent reading. As many scholars writing in the wake of Jurgen Habermas have acknowledged, London's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century coffeehouses were sites for public reading of (and argument about) the contents of the latest newpapers in a cacophanous collision of caffeine, conversation, and print. (Didja catch that alliteration? That's a trick of the ear, not the eye, yet chances are you're not reading this aloud. Sound--or the idea of sound--can invade the lair of the skull, then, though probably not for everyone.)

Many of the spaces in which sounds were created and heard centuries ago still exist. But even if a space no longer exists, the scholar can study architectural drawings or reproductions from the time, study the materials used in the construction of particular spaces to understand how sound waves (whose function remains constant) would have resonated. Of course, with natural spaces an entirely different set of research methods might be employed.

The human voice is generated by body parts that have remained pretty much the same for the last few centuries. The human ear hasn't really changed. The human mind, however, is a much more malleable thing. This is not to say that the gray matter of the brain has evolved into something different than it was in, say, 1600, but rather that the ways we respond to (or ignore, or generate) sound can be affected as much by culturally-bound cognitive development as by biology. Does a person who grew up on a farm relate to sound in the same way as a person who grew up in Manhattan? What about a Londoner who lived from 1700 to 1780 compared to a Londoner who lived 1920 to 2000? Probably not. And so it's the human relationship to sound--to particular sounds, to particular soundscapes--which is really what's at issue.

I hope to be posting more about this, so stay stuned. See also Kari Kraus's observations on "paleoacoustics" at the end of this blog entry.

Posted by at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Two things:

1. I need to email the two people who said they'd be up for hosting future Teaching Carnivals. Three carnivals per semester sounds about right, no?
2. No one has commented on Ryan's recent post, and I think that means more people need to read it. So go!

Posted by at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I need to unplug from this coverage for awhile, but I will make one last comment. Already we're seeing the argument put forward by the Bush faithful that the relief and rescue efforts were actually very well done, regardless of what the "liberal media" would have you believe. I'm not going to link, so you'll have to trust me. I have two predictions for the next couple of weeks as this particular talking point spreads across the conservative wing of the blogosphere and onto Fox News:

1. Local government officials will continue to be blamed by the Bush faithful for causing such an immense crisis, even as Bush-appointed officials will continue to be praised for helping avoid an immense crisis. Pay close attention to the rhetorical three card monte: now it's an immense crisis and local officials must be held accountable for causing it; whoops! now it's not an immense crisis and federal officials are to be praised for their heroic efforts that prevented it.
2. We will see expressions of contempt by right-wing bloggers and media outlets for the great unwashed who are buying into the "liberal media spin" that the federal response to Hurricane Katrina was anything to get worked up about. Remember this the next time a conservative critic of higher education wants to paint professors as snobby elites mocking the ignorance of the public.

technorati tags: hurricane katrina, katrina, katrinasurvivors, nola, neworleans

Posted by at 6:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Do you know, dear reader, if there is an easy way to create RSS feeds of different categories of a blog? In this way, you could subscribe only to my posts about "language and literature," for example. Can you do it in MovableType without too much fuss? Can you do it in WordPress?

Technorati: blogging, rss

Posted by at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Boing Boing links to several Katrina Timelines. They also report that "tech journalist Joel Johnson and hacker/photog/blogger Jacob Appelbaum are traveling through areas impacted by Katrina to document and assist with communications reconnect efforts." Johnson has a blog, and Appelbaum does, too.

A physician blogs his work and travels through post-Katrina New Orleans.

A gallery of nearly 200 photos, taken right before and then after the hurricane by a New Orleans hotel-worker, is available online, with well written captions.

Earlier in the week, David Enders reported on how residents of New Orleans were faring for Mother Jones. Naomi Klein, at The Guardian, worries that "[w]ith the poor gone, developers are planning to gentrify the city." Jonathan Dresner argues that we should let New Orleans grow itself back without letting outside planners kill its soul; we must "make a new space for New Orleans' displaced denizens to regenerate it."

Dr. B. reflects on our changing understanding of the public sphere in the wake of Katrina. Meg advises us to use the Charity Navigator when selecting the recipients of our money or time.

Amardeep Singh takes Bruce Sterling to task for the unconscious racism in a recent post on Hurricane Katrina. Cornel West addresses race, poverty, and Katrina.

Scrivener and Chuck Tryon consider the impact of Flickr photos from the Astrodome.

Mark Fiore has created a killer animation called "Whoopsi Gras."

technorati tags: hurricane katrina, katrina, katrinasurvivors, nola, neworleans

Maureen Dowd has the best opening two sentences of all the op-eds this weekend: "I understand that politicians are wont to put cronies and cupcakes on the payroll. I just wish they'd stop putting them on the Homeland Security payroll."

A Newsweek poll finds the approval rating for President Bush at an all-time low. The New York Times calls "shameful" President Bush's proclamation allowing contractors to pay workers below the prevailing wage on federally-financed projects in parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Gordon Adams, writing at the Baltimore Sun believes it's time for Bush to go.

At The Washington Post, many Katrina-related opinion pieces appear today. Joel Garrreau argues that much of New Orleans simply won't be rebuilt. David S. Broder considers the federal budget and the impact of Hurricane Katrina in light of the last few years' changes tax cuts and spending habits. The federal government must be the one to take primary responsibility for rebuilding the devastated Gulf Coast, according to Eugene Robinson. Hindsight isn't worth much, writes Michael Kinsley. A staff editorial considers how prepared we are, four years after 9/11, for large-scale disasters.

See also these WaPo news stories:

• "Katrina Darkens the Outlook for Incumbents: Public Dismay Could Shape 2006 Elections," by Jim VandeHei
• "In Rural Texas, Blessings and Culture Shock," by Anne Hull
• "The Steady Buildup to a City's Chaos: Confusion Reigned At Every Level Of Government," by Susan B. Glasser and Michael Grunwald

Posted by at 9:58 PM | Permalink

Last Thursday, Apple unveiled the iPod Nano, an amazingly small, all-flash-memory music player in models with 2- and 4-gigabytes of storage. I still love my iPod Mini--which has a metal casing, unlike the new plastic Nano that I would likely sit on and break five minutes after buying--but I have to admit this thing is pretty dang cool.

One significant development to come from this will, I think, be cheaper flash memory since Apple, now the world's largest consumer of the stuff according to Steve Jobs, is pushing factories to figure out how to produce it cheaply and in mass quantities. And cheaper flash memory will mean that we see more and more storage capabilities in everyday devices like cell phones. With storage that small, and that light, the future of personal computing devices can take some interesting directions. I think, as I've written before, that the restriction on size reduction will continue to be what people currently require for input and output: a decent-sized keyboard and a decent-sized screen. But it looks like storage (and processors) will continue to get smaller, lighter, cheaper, and more energy efficient.

(There's a new iTunes phone, but that seems much less exciting.)

More iPod links:

• "IPod Nano To Be a Macro Seller," by Leander Kahney (Cult of Mac)
• "IPod's Latest Siblings," by Walter T. Mossberg (Wall Street Journal)
• "New, Thinner IPod Upstages ITunes-Ready Cell Phone," by Mike Musgrove (Washington Post)
• "You can Use an iPod to Move Music," (from this article in PC World.)

Technorati tags: apple, nano, ipodnano, mp3s

Posted by at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I attended a lecture by William St. Clair back in June. That lecture is now available for download as a PDF, with a Creative Commons license:

"The Political Economy of Reading," by William St. Clair
The John Coffin Memorial Lecture in the History of the Book, 2005

Posted by at 8:33 PM | Permalink

Boing Boing draws our attention to a remix of "Gold Digger," Kanye West's latest single. The remix samples West's outburst last week and changes the song's lyrics into a protest against George Bush.

Also do not miss this mashup of Kanye West and the Beach Boys.

What the heck. Here's TV on the Radio's "Dry Drunk Emperor," too. (Via Badda Blog)

Bonus Links:

• Pitchforkmedia's review of Late Registration
• Robert Christgau's take at the Village Voice
• Rolling Stone's review
• "Is Kanye West The Future of Hip Hop?" by Kevin Scott (Vibe)
• "Why You Can't Ignore Kanye," by Josh Tyrangiel (Time)
• "Future of rap points West," by Robert Hilburn (LA Times)
• "The Rap on Kanye," by Lorraine Ali (Newsweek)

technorati tags: hurricane katrina, katrina, kanyewest, kanye, mp3, mashup, bush, georgewbush,

Posted by at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Katrina People Finder is now live.

Have a look at these two Flickr photo sets of Hurricane survivors in Houston.

"Two trade unionists and paramedics from California who found themselves trapped in New Orleans have written an account of their experiences" (via CT and BPhD).

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities is offering an immediate residential fellowship for a scholar impacted by Katrina.

A project called the Sloan Semester will "bring free online courses to students displaced from colleges shut down due to damage from Hurricane Katrina."

What about region's cultural heritage archived in its libraries and museums? The American Library Association has a page on Hurricane Katrina News and a web page "devoted to library-specific relief funds, available housing for library workers, and resources for coping with the disaster." The American Association of Museums is also maintaining a Katrina-specific webpage. Bonus Link: "In Mississippi, History Is Now a Salvage Job," by Florence Williams (NYT).

The Washington Post has a "special report" section on Katrina. (As many have pointed out, the Department of Homeland Security had primary responsibility for responding to Hurricane Katrina, so while you're on the Post site, check out the series of articles on "Homeland Security Contracting.")

technorati tags: hurricane katrina, katrina, katrinasurvivors, houston, astrodome

At WaPo, see also

• "Few Islands in a Sea of Troubles: From Above, a View Of What Once Was," by Linton Weeks
• "'Going to Take Years -- Years': A Place of Life and Livelihood Turns Into a Wasteland," by Allison Klein
• "Planning for a New, Improved Orleans," by Benjamin Forgey
• "Once More, a Neighborhood Sees the Worst," by Manuel Roig-Franzia
• "Rethinking Defenses Against Sea's Power: Flood Experts See Lessons in New Orleans, by Molly Moore

New York Times

• "New Orleans Musicians Ask if Their Scene Will Survive," by Ben Ratliff
• "Can Design Prepare for Disaster?"
• "Water Returned to Lake Contains Toxic Material," by Sewell Chan and Andrew C. Revkin (NYT)
• "Level of Bacteria Is Found Unsafe," by Michael Janofsky
• "In Europe, High-Tech Flood Control, With Nature's Help," by William J. Broad
• "Behind the First Roar of Machinery to Drain the City, a Tale of Pluck and Luck," by John Schwartz

Wired

• "Building a Better Levee, by John Gartner
• "Getting the Gulf Back on the Grid," by Xeni Jardin

Posted by at 9:39 PM | Permalink

New this fall from the University of Georgia Press is Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, a biography of eighteenth-century Afro-Briton Olaudah Equiano by my dissertation director, Vincent Carretta. Equiano is the author of the autobiographical work The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, first published in 1789, and lately the subject of sometimes heated academic debate over whether he was truly born in Africa, as he claims in his Narrative. One of the issues at stake in this debate is whether or not we have a first-person account of the middle passage, the brutal trans-Atlantic nautical route by which millions of Africans were taken to and enslaved in the Americas.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article up now and an online discussion on Thursday, September 8. As the Chronicle piece points out, lost in the debate over Equiano's birthplace are the impressive details of The Interesting Narrative's publication history as well as its place in literary history:

[Equiano] more or less self-published his autobiography, retaining the copyright -- a risky and unusual move in those days, when most books didn't make it into a second edition -- and putting together a list of well-connected and influential subscribers who agreed to buy copies.

"He was a networker par excellence," says Mr. Carretta. "People call him a black Benjamin Franklin. He published his autobiography before Benjamin Franklin's was published, so we should start calling Franklin a white Equiano. You can't be any more self-made than someone who starts as a piece of property."

...The success of The Interesting Narrative made Equiano a wealthy man, with a considerable estate to bequeath to the daughter who survived him when he died, in 1797. But after the abolition of the slave trade in Britain, public interest in his tale waned, and no new editions of the book appeared after the 1820s or so. Mr. Carretta does believe that Frederick Douglass may have seen it before he published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself, in 1845.

Bonus Links: Ralph Luker points us to recent blog entries about Equiano; Brycchan Carey maintains an impressive webpage on Equiano and summarizes the arguments regarding birthplace; you can buy the edition of The Interesting Narrative edited by Carretta directly from Penguin Putnam's website or you can read the work online (and it's a great read!).

Posted by at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last night, I was IM'ing with Weez, who's currently attending HCI 2005 in Edinburgh, about this and that, and we were looking for other bloggers who might be at the same conference. We came upon one computer scientist whose blog is all business, which led to the following exchange.

Posted by at 11:07 AM | Permalink

Poor Ivan Tribble. So misunderstood. He's back to defend his original column on why it's a bad idea for academics to keep blogs.

Bill Tozier thinks Tribble may have a point:

if I wanted to work in a slow-witted, risk-averse, tyrannically hierarchical, self-importantly pompous, committee-burdened, navel-gazing hidey-hole tucked far away from the world and its concerns ... well, I'd be in trouble then, wouldn't I?

Collin Brooke reveals the (small) kernel of advice at the heart of the columns:

I suspect that CHE isn't paying a whole of money these days to folks writing essays about "How I Hate Blogs." So you've dressed it up as market advice, a column "to help some people land tenure-track jobs." And if your point was "Don't blog; it'll get you in trouble" then even though I disagree, at least there was some point to your essay. Of course, that point, as you seem aware, requires more evidence than a "trend" (?!) identified from a single search in a single discipline at a single school. Originally, you seemed more than willing to make that particular leap in the interests of poking at the blogosphere.

If your basic point is "Be careful what you say," then I'm looking forward to seeing whether or not CHE bothers to pay you for a third column. Because that's not a warning that will help people land jobs--it's a bumper sticker.

Tribble thinks the bloggers who responded to his original column were missing his central point:

As my original column made clear (and many amid the outcry reiterated) when it comes to blogging, I just don't "get it." That's right, I don't. Many in the tenured generation don't, and they'll be sitting on hiring committees for years to come.

Here are a couple of other things I'm sure Tribble doesn't "get":

• del.icio.us links for "tribble" (add your own if you have an account)
• Technorati links for "ivan+tribble"

Tribble assumes that "many in the tenured generation" think just like him. "Many" is a useless word to job seekers. "Many in the tenured generation" haven't kept up with the scholarship in their field, either. Should job seekers try to appear to be equally clueless about the latest developments? "Many in the tenured generation" don't like people who drive imports. "Many in the tenured generation" have model train sets. Who cares?

The fact of the matter is that "many in the tenured generation" will be turned off by job applicants with a dismissive attitude towards academic blogging.

Matt K accumulated examples of the benefits of blogging. What has Tribble accumulated? Anything outside his own experience and opinion?

*crickets*

It's one thing to be ignorant. It's worse to be incurious. But worst of all is to be smug and willfully ignorant. Whether you blog or not, you'd better hope the hiring committees considering your application can't figure it out if the third of these describes your intellectual profile.

Posted by at 3:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I've written before about experiencing vertigo for no reason, and it looks like I found out what causes it. A medication I take causes dizziness as a side effect if you take it or if you stop taking it abruptly. Since I'm now living temporarily in a different state, I needed to do a little work to figure out how to switch my prescription to a local pharmacy, but I kept procrastinating because I was focused on research and writing. My prescription ran out last week, and I just assumed I could go without for a day or two.

Nope. Gradually the dizziness and loss of balance forced me to get the prescription refilled. If I had gone another day, I'm pretty sure I would have been unable to walk without falling down, and nausea was surely right around the corner. Luckily, I'm fortunate enough have health insurance with a decent prescription plan and a wide-ranging network of pharmacies.

But imagine going through that--or a similar experience with other side effects when your supply of medication runs out at the end of the month--in the middle of a city that's been destroyed by hurricane and flood. Now put the news stories of "looters" breaking into pharmacies into their proper perspective.

Posted by at 2:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Click here to help:

Several dozen sites have been established to help survivors of Hurricane Katrina find their loved ones, and to allow people to report missing people. This creates a difficulty for people trying to locate missing persons - they need to search dozens of separate databases and message forums.

So we've decided to create a centralized database, where you can search the data from all of these at one time.

There are two main efforts going on:

• PeopleFinderTech - automate data interchange between survivor databases.
• PeopleFinderVolunteer - coordinate a volunteer effort to input unstructured data by hand into structured databases.

technorati tags: katrina-survivors, hurricane katrina, katrina, nola, new orleans

Posted by at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've noticed some bloggers (and commenters) claiming that we should not place special emphasis on helping the victims of Hurricane Katrina when so many people in local communities need help. In my experience, this is a common argument made by those who aren't really doing much to help people in their own communities (although they like to complain that no one else is). High profile organizations like the Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, and the United Way are as involved locally as they are nationally: any donations to these organizations helps at both levels. If you are concerned with local problems, then fill your blog with links to projects and organizations that help solve local problems. If you prefer to be an inactive slug, then at least be honest about it.

Meanwhile, here's how to help with Katrina:

• "A Clearinghouse for Toys and Supplies for Families Hit Hardest by Katrina," at Been There
• "Relief Information," at New York Times
• More information here...

The following are some first-hand accounts I've come across (I know there are many more):

• "Email from a friend in Houston" and "Email from friend at LSU," posted by Clancy Ratcliff
• "Dispatches from Tanganyika," by Poppy Z. Brite
• "Thank you everyone!," at Slughunter
• The Interdictor
• "The scene at the Houston Convention Center," by Ted Barlow
• "though you might like an inside view," on the Sonic Youth fan forum.

And then from more traditional media outlets:

• In 2002, The Times Picayune published a five-part series called “Washing Away,” that warned of the scenario we’re looking at right now. (Strangely, Michael Chertoff believes that no one predicted this might happen.)
• "A Delicate Balance Is Undone in a Flash, and a Battered City Waits," By Peter Applebome, Christopher Drew, Jere Longman and Andrew Revkin (New York Times, Sunday, September 4, 2004).
• "Living Paycheck to Paycheck Made Leaving Impossible," by Wil Haygood (Washington Post, Sunday, September 4, 2005)
• "Our Hell in High Water," by James Nolan (Washington Post, Sunday, September 4, 2005)
• "French Quarter Becomes Oasis of Wary Calm," by James Dao (New York Times, Sunday, September 4, 2005)
• "What It Means to Miss New Orleans," by Mark Childress (New York Times, Sunday, September 4, 2005)
• "Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?" by Anne Rice (New York Times, Sunday, September 4, 2004)

I also recommend that you bookmark the New York Times special section covering Hurricane Katrina.

technorati tags: hurricane katrina, katrina, nola, new orleans, french quarter, astrodome, houston, baton rouge

Posted by at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Now, I'm well aware that early reports of what's going on can turn out to be wrong, so consider these observations regarding Hurricane Katrina accordingly.

On historical precedent, this comparison should be required reading. How did President Clinton respond to Hurricane Floyd in 1999? How did the first President Bush respond to Hurricane Andrew in 1992? How did President Nixon respond to Hurricane Camille in 1969? The federal government is capable of heroic and effective efforts when disaster strikes. Someone dropped the ball with Hurricane Katrina.

On the "leaving versus staying" issue, no reasonable person can argue on the one hand that the residents of New Orleans should have anticipated the devastation that was coming their way but that the federal government had no way of knowing what to expect or how to prepare.

It is true that some people who were able to leave refused to leave the area as the hurricane approached. As a longtime (though on-again/off-again) resident of the South, I can report that this always happens with hurricanes, yet we've never seen chaos to the extent that we've seen after Hurrican Katrina. This leads me to two conclusions. One, it was not entirely unreasonable for some people to stay behind. Two, to say that the scale of the problem is caused by people who chose to stay behind is obviously wrong.

It is also true that a large number of people were simply unable to leave. According to the New York Times:

Twenty-eight percent of the population of New Orleans lives below the poverty line, compared with 9 percent nationwide, according to census figures. Twenty-four percent of its adults are disabled, compared with 19 percent nationwide. An estimated 50,000 households in New Orleans do not have cars.

And if everyone had left New Orleans, where would they all have gone and what would they have done once they got there? Nearby cities--including Houston and Baton Rouge--are reporting that they are approaching capacity right now in dealing with refugees. Baton Rouge, for example, has apparently doubled in size.

If you had inadequate property insurance, would you find it easy to leave behind everything you own? If you are able-bodied, but someone you love is not and is not easily moved, would you leave them? If your friends or family decided to stay behind, would you leave them? If you had lived through previous hurricanes with no serious problems, would you leave?

On the looting issue, there are those who want to draw a moral distinction between people who took necessities like food and medical supplies and people who took things like clothing and electronic equipment. I would like those people to consider this scenario: Imagine living with no money to buy food or other essentials in a city that has essentially been destroyed. Because no assistance has made its way into the city from the outside, you assume there will be people who do have food and other essentials who might want you to pay for it. Would you hesitate to take things of value in order to trade them for what you needed? It's not like aid is rushing into the city the day after the hurricane, or the day after that. Or the day after that.

Here's what MSNBC's Joe Scarborough had to say:

You got to understand that these are people who have young babies who haven't had water in four days, in some cases, haven't had formula, haven't had basic necessities. I just wonder what you would do, what I would do if we were in a situation where our 15-month-old child or our 2-year-old baby needed something to stay alive. I don't know what you would do. I know I would do anything it took to get what they needed.

Now, I should be getting it from the federal government if I am in New Orleans, from the state government. But I will tell you what. It is amateur hour, and it has been amateur hour over the past four or five days. This is completely different, friends, from the way the crises were handled in Florida last year, four hurricanes, two of them major, it was handled with ruthless efficiency. I know. I was there. That is not happening tonight in New Orleans.

technorati tags: hurricane katrina, katrina

Posted by at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Inspired by the good folks at Crooked Timber, I will send a bag of absolutely incredible stone-ground grits (along with instructions for what to do with said grits, including a N’awlins-appropriate shrimp 'n' grits recipe) to the first 25 people who provide me with evidence (or just plain give me their word) that they have donated $100 to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. Gmail me at non.zombie.

Because of the high-profile sites linking to this morning's Teaching Carnival, I am getting all-time high blog traffic right now. I might as well use my blogging powers for good, no? Bien sur, mes chéris.

Et toi!

technorati tags: hurricane katrina, katrina

Posted by at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Locally, gas prices have gone up a dollar and the lines at the pump have been ridiculously long. Given the problem that the U.S. is facing with its oil supply, has anyone heard President Bush or any other public figure say that we should be talking about car pooling or using public transportation? And will it be possible to track how much profit the oil and gas companies make during these weeks after Hurricane Katrina? If it's a significant increase, doesn't it make sense that they should be expected to donate a more sizable chunk than other entitites to relief efforts?

technorati tags: hurricane katrina, katrina

Posted by at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Greetings, Inside Higher Ed readers. Do you like grits?

Teaching Carnival is devoted to gathering select blog entries related to teaching issues in higher education. Below you will find the first installment. (Be sure to have a look at the common sense words of advice for readers.)

Caleb McDaniel explains how he makes use of the first twenty minutes of his introductory course on U.S. history.

Scrivenings presents an essay assignment involving inductive and deductive logic.

The Salt Box takes issue with one of Gerald Graff's assumptions regarding students and the accessibility of texts.

Savage Minds' Nancy Leclerc asks how useful the "four-field approach" is when teaching introductory anthropology.

"[T]he subtle politics involved in the organization of language courses, specifically South Asian language courses" are analyzed at The Home and the World.

The bloggers at Playing School, Irreverently, In Favor of Thinking, Mode for Caleb, NegativeCapability, and Democratic Socialist Republic of Konibono address a recent column or two on clothing and the classroom.

The Chronicles of Dr. Crazy features "Yet Another Open Letter to Students of English Literature," which prompts much discussion in the comments regarding the work of professors and more conversation here.

The Little Professor provides some preliminary answers to a pertinent question: "what do professors owe their graduate students when they venture out into the thorny fields of journal publication?"

Otto's Random Thoughts presents a course description on "Deported Nationalities in Kazakhstan and Central Asia."

At Easily Distracted, a syllabus for a course titled "Image of Africa" is discussed.

Blogenspiel has been thinking about Vergil and this semester's Ancient/Medieval survey.

At I Know What I Know, a request is made for advice about the degree of specificity in a syllabus' reading schedule.

Syllabus design and reading loads are considered at NegativeCapability

Online syllabi and the culture wars are discussed at Critical Mass.

CBD argues that students need more emphasis on abstract, critical thinking skills when learning about writing and technology and fewer lessons on how to use software.

Alex Halevais is thinking about teaching, technology, and transparency.

The intersections of blogging and teaching are found at decorabilia and Scribblingwoman, while courseware Blackboard offers frustrations at Kairosnews.

Teaching online involves a learning curve for Steven D. Krause.

Two different courseware packages are tested this semester at Working Blue.

Jonathan Dresner considers the challenges of teaching a summer course.

Scott Rettberg finds himself teaching digital media aesthetics in Norway.

The authors of Anbruch and Octopus' Garden, and New Kid on the Hallway are not quite ready to return to teaching at summer's end.

It's tough to switch gears from summer back to the classroom, according to jo(e)'s page.

A batch of bad course evaluations can make it tough to face going back into the classroom, as One Bright Star acknowledges.

A confession is offered at Caveat: Venter.

Dr. History (and readers) share classroom horror stories.

La Lecturess has her "first teaching-anxiety dream of the academic year."

"238 Eager Young Minds" await Sharon Gerald.

At Confessions of a Community College Dean, we find confessions regarding honors programs and their consequences.

If it's August, it must be time for freshman orientation, as we discover at Did we do anything important today?.

A Ianqui in the Village wonders how to handle a student who is very late in completing an incomplete.

The Cynical Professor advises potential students to get a life of the mind.

Russian Violets considers whether a d.u.i. is a valid excuse for missing class.

A student learns how to learn...sort of...at Tall, dark, & mysterious.

Sometimes checking on your book order means you get locked in the bookstore after hours, according to Xom.

Red Bird Rising worries about older teachers who refuse to make room for the new...literally.

Timna misses the generosity of the late John Lovas.

M2H reflects on the first day of class.

The first week of the fall semester brings heat, back-to-back classes, and a need for throat lozenges at Rhetoric and Democracy.

A good first day activity is wanted at the Blog of a Math Teacher.

What Now? addresses “outcome-based student learning objectives” for degrees and courses.

Chuck Tryon discusses ideas for a senior seminar in media studies.

Bitch, PhD realizes that libraries make pdfs.

A Delicate Boy looks forward to the coming semester.

The first day of class was leaky at Earth Wide Moth.

Pedablogue offers advice on teaching the once-a-week course.

Students need to know that the practice of journalism "has very real effects on the polis," according to Rhetorica.

Truth Laid Bear Uber Carnival

Posted by at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (2)

...for readers of Teaching Carnival are necessary, since teaching is often a very sensitive subject for professors, students, administrators, parents, and observers of higher education:

1. A blogger's online persona is often very different from her or his offline persona.
2. Those portions of a blogger's personal and professional life presented online are a narrow slice of the whole.
3. Rough ideas regarding teaching that are sketched out in blogs may come to fruition offline; the fully developed versions of those rough ideas may not be posted online.
4. Bloggers sometimes blow off steam on their blogs, but this does not mean they are constantly irritated or irritable offline.
5. Anonymous bloggers often, but not always, exhibit more freedom in venting about irritations than those who blog under their real name.
6. The practices of anonymous bloggers should not be conflated with the practices of those who blog under their real names.
7. One blog entry by itself does not accurately represent a blogger's personality.
8. Most teaching experiences are not blogged.
9. Most thoughts about teaching are not blogged.
10. Most academics do not blog, so a selection of blog entries on teaching in higher education cannot be used to draw any useful, general conclusions about teaching in higher education.

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