novelist david liss at unity temple

I've mentioned David Liss before. He's the author of three well-reviewed historical novels: A Conspiracy of Paper, The Coffee Trader, and A Spectacle of Corruption. This Wednesday, Liss will discuss his work and sign copies of his books at Unity Temple on the Plaza: 707 W. 47th Street, 7 p.m. For more information, call Rainy Day Books at (913) 384-3126.

wanna see my wiki?

In the interests of experimenting with a variety of online, collaborative technologies, I installed a very simple wiki. Play around with it, if you like. It's the simplest one I could find: PhpWiki.

I'm not sure, yet, what use I/we might have for a wiki, but it's worth experimenting. If you're unfamiliar with wikis, check out the relevant entry in the Wikipedia. I think I would install MediaWiki if I had a specific project in mind because it seems to provide more controls over editing.

i'm giddy with anticipation

As Heidi and BlogKC point out, the new downtown library opens tomorrow morning at 7:00 a.m. I'm pretty darned excited:

• Beautiful, historic building
• Free wireless
• Opens at 7:00 a.m.
• Cafe
• Rooftop terrace
• 5-minute walk from my apartment

I've never lived this close to a library before, much less one as grand as this. I know where I'll be spending a lot of time this summer. Oh, and this just cements my belief that development in downtown Kansas City is going to explode in the next decade or so. If you can afford to buy a condo, do so now.

how much time off does bush need?

One of the excuses the Bush administration is giving for its failure to address terrorist threats prior to 9/11 is that they had not been in office very long when the attacks took place. "We were there 233 days" before the attacks, Condoleeza Rice has said. And now, as violence escalates in Iraq, our president takes another vacation. From the Washington Post:

This is Bush's 33rd visit to his ranch since becoming president. He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking office, according to a tally by CBS News. Adding his 78 visits to Camp David and his five visits to Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush has spent all or part of 500 days in office at one of his three retreats, or more than 40 percent of his presidency.

To me, 233 days actually sounds like a pretty long period of time, but then I'm not absent from work 40% of the year so I'm willing to admit that my perspective might be skewed. A president is only in office for four years per term, of course, and 233 days is about one-sixth of that total. How much time do you need to get things rolling? Although they might "only" have been in office 233 days, did the Bush campaign not have some kind of plan for dealing with terrorism somewhere in their platform? Did they walk into the White House and say, "Okay, now what?"

In August of 2001, Bush was on a month-long vacation in Texas, and was apparently relaxed and having fun catching up on his reading, working on his golf game, and celebrating his 55th birthday. Rice has said that in response to the intelligence community's escalating warnings in summer 2001 indicating a terrorist threat, "The president of the United States had us at battle stations."

As Dana Milbank and Mike Allen of the Washington Post write, "[I]f top officials were at battle stations, there was no sign of it on the surface."

And let's be clear about one thing: "President Bush was warned a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the FBI had information that terrorists might be preparing for a hijacking in the United States and might be targeting a building in Lower Manhattan."

romantic libraries

The latest volume of Romantic Praxis is entitled Romantic Libraries and includes three essays:

• What Was Mr. Bennet Doing in his Library, and What Does It Matter?, by H. J. Jackson
• Bibliographical Romance: Bibliophilia and the Book-Object , by Ina Ferris
• "Wedded to Books": Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists, by Deidre Lynch

The "about" page reads:

This volume seeks to make more visible in Romantic studies not just the ubiquitous bookishness of the period but the role of the physical book in personal and cultural identity-formations. In different ways, all three essays in the volume concentrate on how the public and national role of libaries as institutions of circulation was not only given affective charge but also often unsettled by an individual relationship to books and by the formation of private libraries as personal sites of collection and memory.

open [blog] night

As part of this week's Literature for Life Week activities, the Undergraduate English Council sponsored an open mic night tonight, which I attended. Folks read their poetry, their fiction, and on the spur of the moment, I decided to read a couple of blog entries: Self indulgent autobiography followed by Who do you love?. It was an interesting experience.

"that dreadful terry eagleton"...

...is apparently a phrase uttered by Prince Charles. An interview with Eagleton was published in the NYT in January, but recently cropped up on C18-L. Conversation has ensued, although not so much about the issues Eagleton raises in the interview.

Eagleton misses the mark when he says that theorists aren't addressing the "big questions" he wants them to address. On religion, for example, see The Puppet and the Dwarf : The Perverse Core of Christianity, On Belief (Thinking in Action) , and The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? by Slavoj Zizek and Acts of Religion, by Jacques Derrida.

More...

rice testifies before 9/11 commission

From the PBS Newshour site: Investigating 9/11, including RealAudio of Commission Questioning.

From the Washington Post:

• Analysis: "Zeroing In on One Classified Document"
• "Comparing Rice & Clarke"
• Media analyst Howard Kurtz: "Rice Testimony Is Now History"
• Columnist Dan Froomkin: "Where's the President?"
• "For the 9/11 Families, A Day Without Answers"

The New York Times has a comprehensive section covering the 9/11 panel, including a transcript of the testimony of Condoleezza Rice before 9/11 commission and these two recent pieces:

• "Members of the 9/11 Commission Press Rice on Early Warnings"
• News Analysis: "In Testimony to 9/11 Panel, Rice Sticks to the Script"

The Guardian has a special section on 9/11 that includes this story on Rice's testimony.

From Slate:

• "Why Rice is a bad national security adviser," by Fred Kaplan
• "LexiCondi: Decoding Rice's self-serving testimony," by William Saletan
• Eric Umansky offers a linked roundup of the news

From Salon:

• "The Artful Dodger"
• "The performer lost in her performance," by Alan Gilbert
• "How the war in Iraq has damaged the war on terrorism," by Jessica Stern

And, of course, GoogleNews provides a huge cluster of information.

fall course description

The following is the description for my Fall 2004 permutation of "Histories of Reading, Writing, and Publishing," a course that I proposed back in September:

Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And universal Darkness buries All.

–Alexander Pope

We tend to have such faith in books that we assume the printing press brought with it a wave of enlightenment, as publishing restrictions loosened and print production escalated over the course of the early modern period. As the above quote from Pope demonstrates, eighteenth-century observers were not always so optimistic. This course will explore the profound changes taking place from the seventeenth century into the eighteenth as Britain transformed into a print culture.

We will consider several questions. What are the cultural and theoretical implications of different forms of verbal communication and representation, such as speech, manuscript, or print? How did the practices of authorship, readership, and publishing change during this period? What effect did these changes have on the production, distribution, and reception of such traditionally literary materials as essays, novels, and poetry as well as of other materials such as newspapers, magazines, and dictionaries? How did these changes affect, or engender, the fields of journalism, evangelicalism, politics, and literary studies? We will address these issues through a reading of several different seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts as well as of key contemporary scholarly works. We are likely to read works by Addison & Steele, Behn, Barker, Blake, Donne, Haywood, Hogarth, Johnson, Milton, Pope, Wesley, and Whitefield.

Students can expect to complete class presentations, a take-home exam, an annotated bibliography, and a final research paper building upon the research completed for the annotated bibliography. Graduate students should expect to complete more in-depth research and writing than undergraduate students.

do they have a toddler mosh pit?

Checking in on the daily news at Pitchforkmedia, I came across a reference to "the D.C.-based 'punk rock kids' show' Pancake Mountain" and I thought, "There's a punk rock kids' show named Pancake Mountain?"

Yes, there is.

CFP: History of Reading

Via the listserv of the History of Reading Special Interest Group:

50th Annual International Reading Association Convention
San Antonio, Texas
May 1-5, 2005

In response to the International Reading Association's desire to have consistency in all programs for the 50th Annual Meeting in San Antonio, the History of Reading SIG must have its programs ready to submit to IRA Headquarters by June 1, 2004. Therefore, proposals for presenting at the History of Reading SIG in Toronto [sic, I think they mean in San Antonio] must be received by May 1, 2004.

More...

i miss the comfort in being sad

Kurt Cobain and I were both born just outside of Seattle in January of early 1967. I worked on an entry early this morning that began with, "I want to tell you to just say no to the Cobain hagiography (Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Associated Press, Seattle Times, Launch Yahoo, New Musical Express)."

I wrote more, but I couldn't figure out how to end it, so instead, I'm going to just tell you to go read this article on the reunion and current tour of the Pixies.

Okay, I'll also include this part of what I was writing earlier: "In his WaPo piece, David Segal writes, 'Kurt Cobain would detest all the re-eulogizing prompted by the 10th anniversary of his suicide.' No he wouldn't. Here, Segal participates in one of the shadiest elements of tending to the rock star ethos, something no respectable music journalist should do, in my opinion. Cobain was a rock star, and part of being a rock star is to express disdain for being a rock star. It's cool not to want to be seen as cool. It should be the music journalist's job to call rock stars out on this duplicity. Cobain was as involved in the fashioning of his own indie image as anyone. In Heavier than Heaven, Charles Cross explains that although Cobain told interviewers that the first concert he attended was Black Flag, he had actually seen Sammy Hagar previously."

In his suicide note, Cobain quoted Neil Young, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." I wonder if his daughter would agree. I also wonder if Cobain knew this song by Young:

More...

a googlebomb dropped on intolerance

Via Liz, Michael Froomkin, Norman Geras, and Jewschool: here's the Wikipedia entry on the word "jew" and the Judaism 101 answer to the question, "Who is a jew?"

don't try to confuse us with the facts

Via The New York Times: Two economists have released the draft of a study concluding that illegal music "[d]ownloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates." Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School and Koleman S. Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have conducted what the Times is calling "the first study that makes a rigorous economic comparison of directly observed activity on file-sharing networks and music buying."

[T]hey analyzed the direct data of music downloaders over a 17-week period in the fall of 2002, and compared that activity with actual music purchases during that time. Using complex mathematical formulas, they determined that spikes in downloading had almost no discernible effect on sales. Even under their worst-case example, "it would take 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by one copy," they wrote. "After annualizing, this would imply a yearly sales loss of two million albums, which is virtually rounding error" given that 803 million records were sold in 2002. Sales dropped by 139 million albums from 2000 to 2002.

So why have sales been dropping? Here's my take, and keep in mind it's only a theory unsupported by any rigorous analysis: because most music being produced by the music industry sucks. And the level of suckitude (or suckage, if you're a speaker of French) appears to be following an upward trajectory.

giving kinja a try

I signed up for a free account with Kinja, having read about it on misbehaving.net.. You can read my digest of favorite info sources if you like.

vegetarian indian cuisine

I bought a print copy of the NY Times for my flight to Boston last week. One of the best sections of the Times is their food section. Last week, there was a great article by Julia Moskin entitled, "After Centuries, the Vegetarian Feast of India Finally Arrives." Moskin writes,

With the arrival here of South Indian vegetarian staples like dosas and uttapams, samosa chat and idlis, Indian cooking in New York is finally reflecting how Indians eat in India. And that often means vegetarian meals at least twice a day, or an entirely vegetarian home kitchen. Indian restaurants outside India have rarely reflected the central role of vegetarian cooking in Indian life, or its varied flavors.

Ah, it is to laugh. Ten years after L and I ate first began eating about once a week at Udupi Palace in the DC area, the Times explains to its readers what dosas, uttapams, and idlis are. And KC has Udipi Cafe. Who says New York is the cutting edge?

book history in india

Via SHARP-L, this sounds interesting:

The editors of Print Areas: Book History in India solicit articles for the second volume of the series. Articles may be on any aspect of the history of the book in the Indian subcontinent as well as adjacent or related areas / countries. Articles should ideally be 4,000-8,000 words long and should be written in accordance with the 14th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, with endnotes in the Humanities style. Submissions should be typed in double-space and should not carry the name of the author on the main body. Articles may either be posted to the address below or e-mailed to offog@vsnl.com. In case of e-mail submissions, please attach the article as an RTF document. The last date for receiving submissions is 30 September 2004.

Dr Abhijit Gupta
Prof. Swapan Chakravorty
Department of English
Jadavpur University
Kolkata 700 032
INDIA

Tel: 91-33-24146681
Telefax: 91-33-24137903

Book Production and Distribution, 1625–1800

Reminder for GHW: check out this entry by H. G. Aldis in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-1921) at Bartleby.com. I certainly need to learn more about James Lackington, one of the most successful booksellers of eighteenth-century Britain and an ex-Methodist. Megan Benton first told me about Lackington when I met her at SHARP 2003. He published his Memoirs in 1791, and it looks like they've been reprinted in a modern edition. Amazon.com also lets me know that Lackington gets a mention by James Raven on page 180 of The Practice and Representation of Reading in England.