Becoming Human
This brief presentation was part of a panel at MLA 2020 in Seattle entitled “Being Human, Seeming Human.” The panel brought together researchers from Microso...
This brief presentation was part of a panel at MLA 2020 in Seattle entitled “Being Human, Seeming Human.” The panel brought together researchers from Microso...
Don’t let the thunderstorm know where I am.
This, except with 2+ pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs. Four hours in the slow cooker, on high. Makes brilliant tacos.
We are finally, finally, in the thick of spring — the sun is out, at least some of the time, and the windows are open, at least part of the day. And the abil...
I believe that I have caught myself just this side of a major case of burnout.
As I posted a while back, I’ve been on an extended European trip this summer, beginning with several conferences, followed by a pretty blissful four-week sti...
I find myself at one of those moments at which everything is great and yet nothing seems to be working exactly right. I’ve got an enormous deadline just ahea...
I find myself lately pretty continually dismayed by the frequency with which I have to acknowledge that I’ve lost my good habits. I’ve gotten out of the habi...
Today we’ve got one of those glorious mornings in New York in which you begin to feel the first bits of fall in the air. The sun is up and the temperature an...
Though my focus in writing here for the last ten years has mostly been professional, I’ve never tried to pretend that this wasn’t a personal blog. (In fact, ...
Yesterday, as I noted then, was my birthday, and it was one that I was surprised to find myself a bit ambivalent about. I haven’t really felt bad about a bir...
The Chronicle’s ProfHacker and Inside Higher Ed’s GradHacker have this week collaborated on a series of posts about productivity apps and systems. I’m consta...
The primary bit of awkwardness involved in not-blogging is the transition to once-again-blogging; there’s guilt and embarrassment, and an overwhelming need t...
I’m in the midst of wrapping up a few last items in the office before heading home for the holidays. It’s a slightly odd feeling; this is the first time in a...
I’m headed to Ithaka Sustainable Scholarship 2011 today and tomorrow. I’m taking advantage of the slightly delayed start by actually sitting in the Starbucks...
I’m in what amounts to the last couple of weeks of my sabbatical, and so am finding myself reflecting a bunch on the goals I’d set for myself at the beginnin...
So I’ve managed to survive all of the bullet points on my insane itinerary of June and July travel, and am happily ensconced once again in my very own home, ...
This happened to me again last night. Same intersection, except from the opposite direction; I was turning left across traffic into the side street that lead...
I’m not sure where October went, much less the first two-thirds of November. Actually, I do know where it went: to three conferences in five weeks, with an a...
It’ll no doubt shock everyone to hear that I’ve been starkly unproductive today. Weirdly unable to focus. Distracted. Nervous.
I’ve spent the last few days trying to process my grief over the loss of my colleague Dave Wallace, trying to imagine saying something even remotely signific...
The neighborhood they’re talking about in this article is where my parents live (though the image is from another neighborhood not too far away).
I talked to my mother a little while ago, and the news from post-Gustav Baton Rouge (which only Josh and The Advocate seem to be reporting on at all) is not ...
The transition to life in Paris has gone amazingly smoothly thus far; we’ve found the perfect boulangerie, a great local cafe, and even managed to find our w...
Day 2 has not gone, shall we say, as well as day 1 did. This is primarily due to the fact that I woke up at 2 am, a bit sick and completely unable to go back...
The spring semester doesn’t start until tomorrow, but today’s the first day of the new regime: I got up early, I’m sitting at the computer for half an hour o...
Seriously: forget April.
What is it about being at home that makes me stop blogging? I posted ever so regularly during the Paris sojourn, and even managed the occasional post during ...
It’s raining again! And it looks like it’s going to rain all day!
First off, there are still two full weeks left, plus a full day of packing. And the longest time I’ve spent here before was two weeks, so it’s just like that...
R. and I have been back at work this week after our weekend of picnics, and I’ve been attempting to knock some smallish tasks off the to-do list. The article...
This was the weekend of picnics — first Saturday’s explosion-filled French-speaking one, and then Sunday’s, which was a bit more peaceful and overwhelmingly ...
As I remarked to R. midway through dinner last night, as we sat in the courtyard of the house of a friend of a friend of a friend up in the 20th, listening t...
An email correspondent has asked about — nay, demanded — that post about the meal. I feel honor-bound to comply:
Everyone here has been complaining about the weather non-stop, or, when not complaining about it, apologizing for it. “The weather,” they say, shrugging in t...
Simply marking the moment. Carry on.
The good news is that the mystery box has been found!
There’s always something very odd about being in a place where the 4th of July is only… July 4.
I’m currently reading Empire of Signs (one of the few books that actually went in the suitcase, which I’m trying to spread out enough to tide me over), which...
No sign of box-o-books. Paid approx. $67 yesterday to have two books I already own sent to the woman whose name is on the mailbox, who will hopefully receive...
Sleeping: improved, but not perfect.
I have to admit, I’ve gotten a bit complacent these days. Since moving to an address that the postal system and the various private shipping companies actual...
In no particular order:
We’ve made it back to Claremont, a little less than a week after I set off for Louisiana. The trip was a whirlwind: I arrived there Monday night, R.’s movers...
R.’s been here for the last week, hanging out during his spring break, taking care of some odds and ends. It was fabulous having him here, as it always is, a...
I’m positively breathless about it all: we worked all morning, and then we went out to lunch today, and lunch had spices in it, and then we went shopping, an...
Part of the recent silence has been produced by the fact that everything I’ve been doing over the last however many days it’s been since I got back to Clarem...
Greetings from Paris! I’ll attempt to catch up on The Story Thus Far later today. For now, a warm welcome to 2007, and best wishes that it be a happy, health...
The good news is that I get spared most memes; for whatever reason, they seem to pass me by. Liz just tagged me with this one, though, and since she complied...
“That new haircut really makes you look thin.”
I took a fairly long drive west yesterday, to go to a barbeque hosted by Bitch Ph.D. and attended by some other bloggy folks in the area. I’m always a little...
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/307748243/ "photo sharing")[this week](http://...
Thanksgiving was lovely, if much too fast. I spent a fair percentage of it just clearing my head and attempting to improve my attitude.
Today’s going to be filled with nuttiness. And this time tomorrow, I’m going to be over halfway to Houston, on my way to BTR for Thanksgiving. I’m having one...
There is very little in the world like waking up on Friday and realizing you’ve survived the week, and that it was not even half as bad as you expected.
The thing that has taken up the vast majority of my time this semester — and something on the order of 95% of my emotional energy — is something I absolutely...
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/288930565/ "photo sharing")[the haircut](http:...
I’m reeling. Absolutely astonished. My worldview has been shaken to its core.
Every once in a great while, I get home from the grocery store and discover that they’ve failed to bag something I bought. It’s always annoying, but never wo...
Why do things like this only ever happen when you’re late?
Sigh. My end-of-summer blues have kicked in full-force today. They’ve arrived at a moment that no doubt seems premature, but really, everything’s rushing to ...
As in degrees.
Sitting here at my desk in the niche on the second-floor landing a little while ago, I started to realize that I had been hearing some kind of small aircraft...
It’s been a week of major housekeeping since I returned from New York: first, I needed to unpack all the stuff that I moved back from Louisiana, which arrive...
Graduation just began back in Claremont, and it feels mighty weird not being there. Cooler, certainly; I’m not missing sweltering under the klieg lights in m...
It’s spring break here in Baton Rouge; all the students in our apartment complex have decamped for the Florida coast, the restaurants are empty, traffic is l...
Friday afternoon, I got into the skinny pants. The ones that have been hanging in the closet for at least the last nine months, untouched. And they looked mi...
For the last month, R. and I have been exercising a lot. A lot. And well. It’s the first time since the marathon — hell, it’s the first time since longer ago...
Taking the opportunity to gloat about being in Louisiana while I can: last night, my parents took me and my sister, who was visiting this weekend, to the new...
The subject line of this post is what I muttered at my mother after several hours of hanging out with my family, each and every last member of which is sudde...
A junior colleague of mine, not long ago, reported being asked by some senior faculty members how she had managed to participate in a faculty seminar last ye...
A few days ago, I came within a couple of inches of hitting a pedestrian.
I was awakened just before 1.00 this morning by one heck of a thunderstorm.
Here’s one way to get out of the office before dark: have the power go out. The Claremont Colleges are on one of those reduced-cost power dealies (I think th...
Every semester for the last two and a half years, I’ve arranged things such that my scheduled commitments for the week all fall between Monday and Wednesday....
After what feels like days, my head is at last clearing, and I have my sights set on a productive weekend. Today, however, began with (a) me sleeping in, sti...
I’ve given to the Red Cross, and to Catholic Charities USA.
I woke up appallingly early this morning, considering how late I’d gotten to sleep last night, and lay there thinking about those dreams I’ve been having the...
I’ve found myself, since mid-weekend, with a vastly reduced desire to write about Katrina and its aftermath. I’ve spent a bit this morning trying to figure o...
Things I don’t have the energy to write about right now:
A friend of mine from back in the day directs me to the Hurricane Poets Check-In, where some information has been gathered about the status, as known, of a n...
A pal of mine, whose mother works for one of the region’s power companies, passed on some information that she’d gotten via email. I’m not going to quote the...
I think horseman number three of four has just arrived on the scene: the city of New Orleans is on fire. And there’s no water pressure, and no equipment, to ...
My parents arrived last night, and while both of them look a little wrung-out, and both are clearly very upset about what’s happening to the state they both ...
So they’re calling the city of New Orleans at the EPA, as reported by Wonkette:
Rumors are running rampant. No one seems to know what’s actually happening, and what’s just talk. But the chaos seems to be spreading outside New Orleans.
Governor Kathleen Blanco is ordering everyone who didn’t evacuate from New Orleans before the storm to evacuate now; she’s sending in buses and boats, and ge...
They live in New Orleans, but have families and other connections elsewhere in the state, and so — I hope — almost certainly evacuated early. But their email...
The news out of New Orleans is perversely getting worse instead of better; a two-block long breach in the levee surrounding Lake Pontchartrain resulted in wa...
Today’s the first day of classes. Today’s also the day I decided to start eenching (which is like inching, only more painful) my alarm clock earlier.
My parents have done what they can to protect their boat, which is just on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, and have motored back up th...
I have this genius plan, whereby I get up super early every morning this semester, do the requisite teeth-brushing and contact-lens-in-putting, and then plop...
As in, pandering for my own anxieties, yes, apparently, I was. I’ll post about the anxieties that produced such pandering in the morning. In the meantime, th...
Today began utterly unceremoniously, with a trip to the eye doctor. Things were not looking good when I arrived; the waiting room was completely full, and ab...
You’ve just received a birthday present from your mother via UPS, but your birthday isn’t until tomorrow. Do you open the present right away, or do you wait?
Some days are destined to be expensive. This, alas, is one of them. I knew it was bound to be, because I had my appointment with Mike the blinds guy, but it ...
Say, for reasons that are absolutely, positively, Nobody’s Fault, you find yourself in one seriously grouchy goddamn mood. Like fight-picking grouchy. Fight-...
During the time that R. was in Washington — the most recent time, that is, the last ten months he spent on active duty there — we had a running gag over the ...
So I managed to knock two major items off the mile-long to-do list, and it’s an accomplishment in no small part because (1) these were the two things that I ...
Me? Nada. I didn’t even get the load of laundry I meant to do done (though there’s still time for that, I guess). Best yet, I didn’t even pretend to work — i...
Last night, I went downtown with some folks from the college to picnic in California Plaza, before last night’s performance, in the Grand Performances series...
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/21707200/ "photo sharing") [BRHS stairwell](http://w...
Djever have one of those days where you get up at like seven o’clock in the morning and pull the sheets off your bed because they’re totally overdue to be wa...
So the storied twenty-one year high school reunion has come and gone. And I have to say, I had way more fun than I imagined I would. It was a bit of a blur —...
So I was at home this morning, getting dressed to my usual KCRW soundtrack, when the station cut away to CNN’s audio feed, covering the announcement of the n...
So, moved as I was yesterday by the solemn, sonorous tolling of the bells at the church just a block from me, whose bell tower I can see from my balcony, but...
I’ve spent the morning sitting on my balcony reading student papers and enjoying the quiet. The church two blocks from me had been ringing its bells for abou...
Where is the line between being that cool professor who shows up to student events and that skeezy professor who used to be cool but still shows up to stuff?...
I’ve been watching since the beginning of the year, I think — yes, in fact, my first sighting was Liz back on January 4 — as first one and then another of my...
The other thing is that moving makes it completely impossible to do anything else other than move. Because I can’t find any of the stuff that I need to do it...
Last New Year’s Eve, I spent some time counting my blessings over a big pot of gumbo and an Angel marathon, and then spent the first day of 2004 recovering f...
Well, finished, at least. Grades are turned in, and everything that needed to get read got read (and please don’t ask me to be more specific about that). And...
This lucky: I had a mildly crappy day yesterday, and was feeling sorry for myself, and so R. bought a plane ticket to fly down to Atlanta and hang out with m...
It’s 4.24 am as I begin this entry. I’m sitting in the Ontario (California; you have no idea how many times I’ve been asked for my passport when trying to fl...
Julia Child, the woman who single-handedly saved American cuisine, died yesterday at age 91.
There’s been a repeated refrain in my posts this summer: not-working, something I’ve been doing a lot of for the last two and a half months. I’ve been ponder...
I’m upright, today, and out from under quarantine. Both of these things feel like victories.
[Part 3 in a series. Read Part 1 and Part 2.]
Why I’m glad I moved to California. If it’s a choice between this:
The appearance of my old pal Trent in the comments below reminds me: I’m fast approaching an altogether alarming milestone — the 20-year high school reunion.
I’m still obsessing about the LSU-Oklahoma game, reading everything I can get my hands (or my mouse) on, and generally relishing the little glow that comes w...
Welcome to 2004. The year started while I was asleep, as I predicted; after a minor DVD-marathon (yeah, yeah, yeah; I’ve been a Buffy-fan for years, but some...
I’ve returned from the MLA adventure, and the Louisiana adventure before that, and the London adventure before that. I’m not, as Liz is, the kind of person w...
Posting plans have been completely overcome by the days-long non-cooperation of my hosting provider. They’re back, but now I find myself with precious little...
[Part 2 in a series. Part 1 is here.]
[Part 1 in a series. Read Part 2 and Part 3.]
Here’s the part where I start feeling guilty — because we’ve been spared, largely, here in Claremont. And so I start thinking things like “whew, that was clo...
Here are words I hope never to have to say again: I have packed my emergency evacuation kit, and can be ready to get out of the house in ten minutes or less.
Tuesday’s high temperature here in Claremont was 102 on Mr. Fahrenheit’s scale. Today it’s snowing.
I should begin with the caveat (possibly disingenuous) that I’m not ordinarily big on the “let me share with you the completely bizarre dream I had last nigh...
A colleague of mine, whom I haven’t seen frequently enough of late, given our mutually crazy schedules, my increasingly frequent travel, and his life with tw...
Just a few miles north of here — how few can be attested by the near-constant whirring of engines overhead and the overwhelmingly acrid air — the mountains a...
Tomorrow is the twentieth anniversary of the crash of Pan Am 759, which fell victim to a wind shear during takeoff from New Orleans International, plowing in...
As I posted a while back, I’ve been on an extended European trip this summer, beginning with several conferences, followed by a pretty blissful four-week sti...
Having wrapped up a whirlwind spring, in which I successfully got through the craziness of buying an apartment in NYC, got myself more or less moved into it,...
I’ve been on the road for a little over two weeks now, across three countries and nine time zones, and while I have a host of more serious topics for discuss...
I need to begin this post by thanking Julika Griem for inviting me on what I hope was only a first visit to Frankfurt’s Goethe Universität; it was a privileg...
In what universe did I think I was going to get any writing done on my flight?
This morning is filled with the millions of details required to get self and stuff out the door and on the road for the better part of seven weeks. It’s the ...
I finally managed to purchase the last of my summer plane tickets yesterday.* I’ve got a bunch of travel coming up, most of it work-related, but part of it i...
We’re at the airport, on our way back to the US. Earlier this morning, as we were checking out of the hotel, I took one last look around the reception area, ...
Today’s our last full day in Dublin; tomorrow morning, we head to the airport to fly to Newark, where I’ll then kill three hours before hopping on another pl...
The Christmas market in Old Town Square has a smallish stage set up at one end; this stage is used throughout the Christmas season for performances of variou...
</param></param></param>
Prompt the 22nd:
It’s been an eventful couple of months. A travelful couple of months, even. If you were able to see my Google Calendar, you’d see a whole lot of teal stripin...
The good news is that I’ve gotten my exercise today: after dragging the suitcase to the train station, and up and down the various flights of stairs between ...
I’m standing in the airport, after the usual delirious experience of waking up at 3.30 am to be ready for my 4.30 am cab. The flight I’m about to board, as u...
Soon, at least.
Today marks the first time I’ve sat in the terminal waiting two and a half hours for the sun to melt the ice off the wings of my airplane, because my Souther...
Our twelve weeks in Paris have slid by alarmingly fast, and we’re deep in the thick of packing up for Thursday’s trip back to California. I’ve gotten myself ...
There are some things that I’m just not getting used to negotiating in French. The telephone, for instance, still gives me shivers when it rings, and not (or...
The most amazing thing thus far about our return to Paris is the immediacy of our immersion; having landed yesterday at CDG, taxied to the apartment we’re re...
That summer is here is pretty undeniable — in fact, unseasonably so: as we venture into graduation weekend, we’re beset by severe heat advisories and a serio...
A nine-hour time zone change in one direction, followed two days later by a three-hour change back the other direction.
We left the flat this morning at 9, headed into the various queues that make up pretty much the entirety of the CDG experience. The taxi was fine, the airpor...
Yesterday was the summer solstice, of course, the longest day of the year, which hereabouts began with the first bits of sun, sometime around 5.15 am, and en...
In no particular order:
The last three days have been utterly consumed with departure-for-Paris business. We head off tomorrow morning, and there are at least three things I need to...
So why am I attending meetings and writing reports?
We’ve made it back to Claremont, a little less than a week after I set off for Louisiana. The trip was a whirlwind: I arrived there Monday night, R.’s movers...
In Houston, on my way to North Carolina for HASTAC. If you’re there, look me up. And with any luck, there might be actual posting from the scene.
There’s been a lot of talk about the need for an Air Traveler’s Bill of Rights of late, particularly since February’s JetBlue fiasco. I’m all for pressuring ...
Two of my favorite things in the world: spring break and Hawaii. Neither has quite panned out, this go-round.
So apparently what it takes to get me something to blog about is leaving town. I’m traveling today, and am currently sitting in a Crown Room in Atlanta’s Har...
I’m currently here, doing this. The return to the U.S. was only moderately painful (perhaps because mostly experienced in a state of denial and delirium). Th...
This has been a weird month. Weird enough that my last transatlantic flight seemed astonishingly easy. Heck, weird enough that I can use a phrase like “my la...
It’s pretty much been a non-MLA, due to complete and total physical collapse. When I arrived in Philadelphia, after the shuttle bus, the first plane, the shu...
I woke up this morning around 3.30, almost on purpose–my wake-up call was set for 4.30, so I went ahead and got out of bed, rather than spend an hour wonderi...
I’m now completely convinced that this place really is the capital of Christmaslandia. And I mean that in a good way. All week, we’ve wandered out in the eve...
Our first full day in Prague was spent in a state of mild to moderate delirium. After we finally arrived at the hotel on the evening of the 18th, R. and I fo...
[This post was written on 19 December; internet access has been a bit non-ideal, so things are coming on a bit of a time delay.]
Today’s going to be filled with nuttiness. And this time tomorrow, I’m going to be over halfway to Houston, on my way to BTR for Thanksgiving. I’m having one...
Apple Teams Up With Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM & United to Deliver iPod Integration.
I’m reeling. Absolutely astonished. My worldview has been shaken to its core.
I’m back in SoCal, and so is my suitcase, though it decided to take a little breather in Houston halfway through the journey. (So yes, for those of you keepi...
I haven’t exactly recovered from my d?©calage horaire yet, but the trip thus far has gone quite well. I got up at 4 am on Thursday and was, thankfully, ready...
So I’m on the road again, in NYC, and I’m desperately trying to get done at least a small fraction of the stuff that has to be completed by a week from Tuesd...
There’s good news, for me, at least: because, on returning to the U.S., one goes through customs on the Canadian side of the border, and because one can’t ch...
I’ve written before about how productive I manage to be while I’m on the road, whether it’s a matter of working on planes or in hotels (something I’d swear I...
No way I can leave it at that. Not when there’s so much more to tell.
I’ll just say that today was not the ideal day to fly out of LAX, and leave it at that.
Confirmed and ticketed:
So, I’m sitting in Houston, waiting on the inbound aircraft that will take my outbound flight merrily back to the west coast. We’re going to be about an hour...
It’s been a fabulous visit, but I’m about up to here with both the heat and the humidity. Not to mention the crazy fattening food, the omnipresent alcohol, a...
Two and a half hours on the runway in Houston. Fortunately, there was beer after that.
I flew back from NYC on Monday, and have been trying to recover and unpack from the trip, as well as unpacking the stuff that arrived from Louisiana while I ...
For the first time in, oh, a little less than five years, my flight into LaGuardia today flew straight up over Manhattan. As in, I looked out my window, and ...
Having picked up the 40 in Amarillo (despite hearing that Oklahoma City is oh-so-pretty), we sped on through Gallup, New Mexico, as well as Flagstaff, Arizon...
1. The rest area on Highway 287 a few miles north of Chillicothe, Texas has open wireless. I didn’t use it, but I was sorely tempted to blog from there, the ...
This post has taken me an unconscionably long time to write. I didn’t have net access in Nassau–or, more accurately, I didn’t seek out net access in Nassau–a...
This weekend, as others are celebrating the end of classes for the spring semester, I’m flying off to Nassau. This trip is in the main a girls’ trip, a long ...
I drove into New Orleans late last night, and will be heading out to Jazz Fest later this afternoon. Given the darkness, I wasn’t able to get an overall sens...
The alarm went off this morning at 4.30, waking me after a much too brief four and a half hours of sleep. I woke up groggy and dehydrated and otherwise feeli...
Good gravy, but I’m useless on a Friday afternoon. I’ve gotten nowhere in the drafting process today, not least because my usual morning yogalates class comp...
I’m back in Claremont for a few days, for a couple of departmental events. Because I’ve rented out the condo, I’m spending these few days crashed on a friend...
I’ve been in New York for the last couple of days, and though I’ve had the computer with me, and have been having a fabulous time, I haven’t felt the least b...
The trip to SoCal to gather the last of my stuff, cram it in my car, and turn the condo over to my tenant (which concept weirds me out a bit) passed in a bit...
Yesterday:
I’ve been having this series of moments of late that can only be adequately described using R.’s wonderful phrase, “light dawns over Marblehead,” the moment ...
We took an early morning train from Amsterdam to Paris yesterday and, after checking into our pretty over-the-top wonderful hotel here, wandered down to the ...
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/77977358/ "photo sharing")[Amsterdam, from hotel roo...
Thus far, R. and I have managed to survive our holidays with only a modicum of fallout, which is not a thing to be said lightly. In fact, it may well be temp...
It’s taken me a few days since arriving in Baton Rouge to clear up the last details of the semester, but grades are now filed, comments have all been sent to...
I’ve had several conversations with folks over the course of the week, conversations that were mostly about my stress level and general bad attitude, that re...
Yesterday’s travel was relatively painless, and generally productive; I managed to get the batch of project proposals that I needed to comment on done, which...
The last five days have been absolutely dreamy — arrived in BTR at 9.30am, delirious and vaguely cranky, but got taken home to the fabulous apartment I’ll be...
Tired, headachy, IAH, wi-fi, blah blah blah. You know the drill.
Traveling weekend number four of four begins with the red-eye Wednesday night. This leaves me — or left me, in any case — approximately 72 hours between gett...
Otherwise known as 6 am in Houston. Greetings, once again, from mid-red eye IAH. The flight out of ONT was relatively painless, due to an upgrade: got on the...
Sitting in the club lounge in HNL, waiting for a flight that is still hours away. The last day in Hawaii is always hard, not least because your flight never ...
So my last post garnered me more than one slightly shocked “you brought your laptop to Hawaii?” from my faithful correspondents, which didn’t make me reconsi...
I’d completely forgotten, since I was last here, that one of my favorite things about Hawaii is its time zone. Hawaii is to California as California is to th...
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/28845650/ "photo sharing")[aqueduct](http://www.f...
I did make it home yesterday, though not without a snippet of travel drama. The flight was smooth, overall, though we got put into the fly-past-the-airport-a...
I’ve only got a minute before dashing for this morning’s flight, which will finally get me within spitting distance of home. This delay was mostly planned-fo...
First, I left Santa Maria Maggiore off the litany. It should have come between the Catacombs and the Pantheon.
Spanish Steps. Piazza Venezia. Trevi Fountain. Via del Corso.
Every time I think I’ve got it beat, it comes back and kicks me in the ass. Several trips back, I was unable to sleep the first night I arrived in Europe. Th...
Ah, Italia. Life is good, if the Internet access ain’t exactly easy. I’ll post more when there’s not a line waiting for the business center’s computer; for t...
Actually, my head spins in a light breeze, at this point. But this was nonetheless annoying:
Way east. I’m back in the airport — my wonderful little airport, with the free wifi (though it’s behaving like free wifi, I’m afraid — flashing on and off, f...
All things considered, the red-eye went quite well. R. has thanked me repeatedly for flying “all night” to come out here to see him, which is extremely sweet...
The Houston airport is an absolute wonder at 5.40 in the morning — ghostly quiet, deserted, just beginning to stir to life. Though the circumstances surround...
Greetings from the twelfth circle of hell, one Dante missed on his little tour: the airport at midnight. I’m waiting for the red-eye to IAH, which is going t...
The travel day yesterday went completely smoothly, utterly without any of the usual delays and aggravations. But there’s a moment I need to share, about a ho...
The return, thus far, is going more smoothly than the venture out. For one thing, this is perhaps the first time that I’ve traveled at entirely reasonable ho...
Frequent flyer summer continues today with a quick dash to Louisiana to see my pal Marcus. I decided at the last minute to drag the Powerbook with me, but gi...
Claremont is lovely. My job is fabulous. My students are wonderful.
Why, oh why, do I persist in flying through Houston?
Here’s a sign of how spoiled I’ve become: I’m sitting in the President’s Club in the Houston airport, using the free wi-fi, and bitching and moaning because ...
The good news first: I’ve finally gotten close to caught up on sleep. I’ve managed to get through almost all of the dumb administrative tasks that have lande...
Why is it that I invariably return from a big trip with some crazy travel saga? And why is it that so many of those sagas revolve around Washington, DC? I’m ...
Hear that?
Despite last year’s suspicion that this year’s Thanksgiving would be spent with my family, at the usual New Jersey Italian feast, things changed. My mother d...
Something I forgot to mention: the state of Vermont was so welcoming that it simply did not want me to leave. Or something. The result may have been the most...
I’m sitting in an airport lounge, using the stupidly expensive wifi to post this entry, not least because it’s distracting me from the fact(s) that:
I left SoCal on Thursday, headed to DC for a little birthday-related celebration activity. Between the day of flying (in which one gets up at what R. refers ...
So aside from the connectivity issues, Hawaii was fantastic. But it got me out of the habit of writing, sad to say, and left me hopelessly behind on all my s...
Internet access here in Wailea sucks. Which is the only bad thing I have to say about the place.
Planned Obsolescence was born a bit over two years ago on the island of Oahu. As has been true for many others, a journey back to the origin is inevitable. L...
A quick story from the France trip that I’ve been looking forward to telling, but hadn’t quite found the right moment for:
And courtesy of Marcus: the famous sofa-baignoire:
Returned to Paris last night, and will head toward the airport shortly for the long trek home. I’ll post more either from Houston or from home. It’s been a g...
What of Wednesday I spent in Paris was mostly spent in the post-travel fog I always find myself in; once I got to Marcus’s apartment, I showered, and then he...
[The following was written on the Powerbook in Paris at 6 am today, and is being transcribed in an internet cafe in Tours now. I’m not sure how much posting ...
[What follows was written at 30,000 feet. I’m no longer there, but firmly on the ground, for another fifteen minutes or so…]
But I am drowning.
Just as things in Claremont begin to slow a bit, my travel schedule picks up. I’m headed to Atlanta tomorrow morning, to attend SCMS. I’ll be speaking on a p...
I’ve returned from the MLA adventure, and the Louisiana adventure before that, and the London adventure before that. I’m not, as Liz is, the kind of person w...
I’ve apparently gone on another hiatus, without really intending to do so; the hubbub surrounding the MLA issues discussed here caught me a little by surpris...
I’m back in London, this week, and so this marks my fourth experience of the bone-crushing Los Angeles-to-Europe time-zone-change in the last six months. Com...
I’m headed back to London this afternoon for Thanksgiving break. We’re in a hotel this time, where R’s managed to cadge free high-speed access, so I ought to...
First there was AoIR in Toronto. Then a quick trip to Boston for a meeting. Then the conference I organized here. Then several days with Mom.
I took off from Ontario this morning, not only on time but a full ten minutes early (Pilot: “Well, folks, everybody’s here, so we’re gonna go”). The skies we...
I’m headed to Toronto this afternoon, and will be there through Sunday. As befits the conference, I’m traveling fully wired (wireless-equipped laptop, iPod, ...
Alas, the blogging-from-London bit didn’t pan out quite as well as I’d hoped — in no small part because I was having too much fun to stop and reflect on the ...
BT has managed to get things up and running here once again (not that we really blame him for the outage, which was admittedly systemic and not individual, b...
One of the things one does as a tourist in Prague — one of those musts, like visiting the Eiffel Tower in Paris, or seeing the Empire State Building in New Y...
2002 ended with a lurch: My flight back west was hung up in Houston for 3 hours due to storms, and so arrived at 1:15 am on December 31, rather than 10:15 pm...
A brief return to the blogsphere, with the promise of more shortly.
The last day in Hawaii, alas. Packing up the suitcase, hunting for the items lost beneath the bed. Realizing that I only took 8 pictures while I was here, an...
for many things. For getting up at 4 am since your body can still be fooled into thinking it’s 9.
[Crossposted from The New York Academy of Medicine’s Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health, which has published a cluster of posts previewing ...
Having wrapped up a whirlwind spring, in which I successfully got through the craziness of buying an apartment in NYC, got myself more or less moved into it,...
I’ve spent the last two days in a meeting of the MLA Program Committee, thinking about, among other issues, the future shape of the convention — the new kind...
Last month, I was honored to be a keynote speaker at Re:Humanities, an undergraduate conference on digital media in academia organized by students at Haverfo...
Keynote Nancy Baym, “This Song’s for You”
Utterly fell down on the notetaking/blogging job today, due to early frustration when the paper I’d shown up early for wasn’t presented, and then a long mid-...
Session 4 Networking and Social Sites
A first in my conference-going experience: the first keynoter is sick in bed (get well, Jon Bing!), so the lecture hall is inhabited by sparse groups of folk...
Session 2: CMS Futures: The Way Ahead for Course Management Systems Alex Halavais, Jeremy Hunsinger, Ted Coopman, Helen Keegan
Please note that what follows are my notes, taken as I listen. Anything weird in here should be assumed to be my fault, and not that of the speakers.
Today’s the first day of the eleventh annual conference of the Association of Internet Research, and the sixth of which I’ve attended. It’s lovely catching u...
I’ve got a bunch of talks and conferences and other things scheduled in the coming weeks:
It’s been an eventful couple of months. A travelful couple of months, even. If you were able to see my Google Calendar, you’d see a whole lot of teal stripin...
What follows is a rough transcript of the talk I gave this past weekend at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses. The panel wa...
My friend Liz Losh has let me know that this Friday UC Irvine is hosting a conference to celebrate the addition of Richard Rorty’s papers to the Critical The...
This morning, awfully bright and awfully early, I participated in a fantastic roundtable on the legacy of David Foster Wallace, which was quite well-attended...
I’ve been busy tweeting up a storm at the MLA this year (or what amounts to a storm for me, anyhow), but haven’t been compelled to write a full blog post as ...
I’m going to embed my slides from today’s talk here, but you’re probably better off actually looking at them on SlideShare, as you can see the notes that way…
I’m in Milwaukee this week at the tenth meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers. The good news is that the wireless is strong, ubiquitous, and fre...
Yesterday was the first full day of the Digital Humanities 2009 conference, the first iteration of which I’ve gotten to attend. So far the conference has bee...
Well, I suppose that three out of six isn’t half bad:
Soon, at least.
I’m in the Boston area this week, speaking at a couple of conferences, the first of which is starting as I type — a meeting sponsored by AcademicCommons, a s...
Just now via email:
Add this to the list of difficulties presented by holding SCMS in Tokyo this year: the government apparently asked the university at which the conference is ...
I’m at MiT6 this weekend, which is starting up as I type; if you’re here, be sure to say hello. I’ll post more from the conference as things unfold.
The following is a call for papers for a session sponsored by the MLA’s Media and Literature Discussion Group, to be held at the 2009 convention in Philadelp...
Incidentally, I just found out that my proposal for MiT6 was accepted; I’ll hope to see some of you there in April.
The most amazing thing about conferences for me is always how energized I am during and after them, how excited I become about whatever project I’m working o...
The last few weeks have been a bit of a blur, between the election, a pile of grading, a few general crises around here, and so forth, but one of the things ...
Alarmingly, we’ve hit the midpoint of spring break already, and this is the first time I’ve managed to post. I’ve meant to post every day — really, I have — ...
For the last couple of years, I’ve been a member of the executive committee of the MLA’s discussion group on literature and media (a group name that makes me...
The symposium was a smashing success, I’m happy to report; the talks were all pitch-perfect and, for a Saturday, we got a respectable turnout. Honestly, thou...
One presentation in this session on open access; notes below the fold.
This morning’s first panel was on campus strategic planning initiatives.
Final presentation of the day, from Dan Schnaidt, below the fold.
Three excellent presentations in this session, below the fold.
Today’s the NITLE conference on campus, beginning with a plenary panel on Scholarly Publication. My paper (based on my article, “CommentPress: New (Social) S...
I spent most of yesterday working on cutting a 35-page paper down into the 15-20 minute talk I’ll be giving on Friday at a NITLE symposium on collaboration i...
Recovering today after a quite wonderful MLA. I got to meet several people that I’d been hoping to introduce myself to for a while, I got to catch up with so...
The last few days have been a blur of travel and family, all of which I survived, though not without some bumps along the way. I’m happily ensconced in my ho...
This morning’s keynote speaker was one of my favorite people, John Willinsky, head of the Public Knowledge Project, which has produced both the Open Journal ...
Yesterday’s keynote was from Henry Jenkins, entitled “The Moral Economy of Web 2.0: Reconsidering the Relations Between Producers and Consumers.” I’m posting...
I sorta dropped the ball on conference blogging yesterday, as I got increasingly caught up in conferencing itself — but I’m going to attempt to catch up on t...
The first panel I made it to today (I slept in a tiny bit, and then got so irate over the Chronicle that I missed the first session) focused on the question ...
The last panel for me for today was a collection of papers focused on methodological questions, ranging from the formulation of research premises, through th...
Post-lunch panel today on blogging, with four excellent papers: Sean Lawson, on milblogging in relationship to the military’s official attempts to regulate a...
The first keynote of the conference was from John Lester of Linden Labs, on Second Life. It was an interesting talk, for someone (like me) who has paid very ...
First panel of the day, on sexuality and gender online; several excellent papers. I’m particularly compelled by Michele White’s exploration of the heteronorm...
I’m headed here later today, for this. I’m certain to see him, and him, and no doubt a bunch of other folks, too. Look me up if you’re there.
Session 4: New Economics
Finishing up the notes from yesterday’s meeting:
Session 2: New “Texts”
Notes from this morning’s first session follow. Any misrepresentations herein are solely the fault of the note taker.
I’m in Oakland for the day today, at a thoroughly exciting meeting: “New Structures, New Texts: A Summit on the Library and the Press as Partners in the Ente...
For the last year or so, I’ve been an extended faculty member of Claremont Graduate University’s School of Information Systems and Technology, though that af...
The notes that follow are entirely my fault, and not at all the fault of the speakers. That said, I’m going to attempt to give a sense of what I take from va...
In Houston, on my way to North Carolina for HASTAC. If you’re there, look me up. And with any luck, there might be actual posting from the scene.
An MLA moment I haven’t written about, as yet: I had three and a half minutes between meetings, at one point, and so I grabbed the laptop and headed for the ...
Folks I’d met before, whom I was happy to see again:
Today was a heck of a day at the MLA. I actually experienced the conference, and the way it was meant to be experienced, I think.
It’s pretty much been a non-MLA, due to complete and total physical collapse. When I arrived in Philadelphia, after the shuttle bus, the first plane, the shu...
I woke up this morning around 3.30, almost on purpose–my wake-up call was set for 4.30, so I went ahead and got out of bed, rather than spend an hour wonderi...
Notes from my session at Flow, below the fold. I’ll be cross-posting these at making MediaCommons shortly.
More notes from a very interesting session of Flow.
I’m posting some of my notes from yesterday’s sessions here. These notes should be taken primarily as my impressions of the conversations that took place; an...
Yesterday’s presentations were overall quite provocative, and have been wonderfully blogged by Bryan, James, and Laura. There’s been a tension throughout, ho...
This morning’s first talk, by John Appley and Albert Borroni of Oberlin College, raises a very interesting problem: as the LMS becomes increasingly popular, ...
Ooh, boy, is this going to be interesting. I’m arguing in my presentation tomorrow that (in a very small nutshell) the so-called “learning management system”...
I’m in Portland for the weekend, attending a NITLE symposium on Learning Management Systems in the Liberal Arts College at Reed. It promises to be interestin...
Panel 3 Anne Bartlett-Bragg and Ricardo Cambiassi
So the talk went extremely well, I think; I got some good, challenging questions that I’m looking forward to pondering at some length. And I’d point you towa...
Panel 1 Elmine Wijnia & Ton Zijlstra and Uldis Bojars, John G. Breslin & Alexandre Passant
Keynote 1 Rod Smith (IBM) on Mashups
Did I mention that the presentations are available on video? They’re generally posted within several minutes of being completed. Which means that mine should...
Panel 5: Frank Mantek and Jeremy Ruston
Panel 4: Wolfgang Zeglovits and Raymond Elferink & Graham Atwell
Keynote 2: Matt Mullenweg, “WordPress and Jazz”
Panel 3: Alexandre Passant and Suw Charman
Panel 2: Lee Bryant and Dieter Rappold
Panel 1: Adolfo Estallela and Jan Schmidt
I’m going to attempt to blog as much of the conference as I can. This is the usual caveat about the fact that what follows is my notes from these talks; any ...
So I’m in Montreal for the American Sociological Association meeting, where we’re doing some interviewing. I have to reiterate that there’s something lovely ...
I’ve been in San Diego with my mother since Friday; she’s here for a conference, and I’m here as her date. The conference is that of a national organization ...
I’ve had a paper accepted for this October’s BlogTalk Reloaded, and so it appears I’m headed to Vienna in October. This looks like a fascinating set of paper...
Last time I went to SCMS, in 2004, was I think the first conference the organization had held since the addition of the M to its name and, as I’ve snarked ab...
So I walk into a session after lunch on Friday, a workshop entitled “An Economy of the Gift”: Should Scholarship Be Available for Free?, where I am handed a ...
For archival purposes (as well as for anyone else interested) this is a link to the page of links I used in my talk yesterday.
After what seems like way more hassle than was strictly warranted for a little ERJ jaunt from BTR to IAH, I’m sitting in my favorite President’s club waiting...
There is something quite lovely about reading everybody’s early MLA posts and knowing that, not only am I totally not going there this year (for only the sec...
As Alex notes, the AOIR folks are debating the next conference’s structure, trying to decide whether to include more alternative session formats in amongst w...
It’s taken me since yesterday evening to be able to post this, first because the presentations were so inspiring for me that I took notes that were more copi...
I’m playing a bit of hooky this morning, hoping to get a little work done. Day three of any given conference is usually the day when my brain says “enough!” ...
I wasn’t really able to take notes during the roundtable on “revolution or reform” I participated in at noon today, but I wanted to note a few things from it.
What follows are my notes on Saskia Sassen’s keynote address, “Digital Formations: The Intersection of Technical and Social Logics in Electronic Space.” A re...
On the up side, I slept like a big dog. Apparently, there was a choice to be made between sleep and breakfast, one I thought I’d sorted out — the concierge l...
This is the roundtable I’m speaking on, not that you’d be able to tell from the program. Not that, in fact, you’d even know I was at the conference. Grrr.
Well, there’s wireless. Sort of. It was there for a second and then it totally died, so this is going to be less liveblogging than intermittent blogging, muc...
Otherwise known as 6 am in Houston. Greetings, once again, from mid-red eye IAH. The flight out of ONT was relatively painless, due to an upgrade: got on the...
I’ll be there. Lilia will be there. Alex will be there.
I’ve just posted a CFP for a panel for the 2006 meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies to the SCMS bulletin board. Despite the group’s name chan...
Yesterday was a fabulous day at documentary boot camp, and a very good note for me to go out on. There are, in fact, two more days to go in the Flaherty, but...
Another foreshortened day at the Flaherty; in the middle of the afternoon screening, I began developing a massive headache, so when it was over, I headed hom...
A shorter day at documentary bootcamp yesterday; I only caught the beginning of the evening session, as I wanted to get home and relax a bit. The films are a...
After further thought, I’ve decided that there was something more to last night’s film than I’ve given it credit for, and that the protracted nature of its b...
[UPDATE 6.14.05, 8.27 am: edit to correct stupid day/date mistakes.]
[UPDATE, 6.14.05, 8.28 am: edit to correct stupid day/date mistake.]
This is a mighty busy weekend, under normal circumstances, but this weekend is decidedly not normal. Theoretically, today is Class Day — departmental recepti...
I’ve arrived and checked into the Atlanta Hyatt Regency. Forgive me for what follows; it’s a deeply unprofessional conference entry, but for whatever reason,...
I’ve just completed a draft of the paper I’ll be giving at next weekend’s American Studies Association conference in Atlanta. It’s on the relationship betwee...
Greetings from Vermont.
I wish I could say things were on an upswing. Here’s the good news: the panels I attended yesterday were, by and large, quite good; the two keynotes thus far...
Friday was travel day — SuperShuttle at 9.55 am; flight out of Ontario at 12.40 pm (yes, SuperShuttle requires the better part of three hours to get you 15 m...
Off to Sussex. More from there, as connectivity allows.
My obligatory conference day-of-hooky has come a little earlier than usual; under ordinary circumstances, I usually burn out on panels on the third day and z...
What follow are my notes from this afternoon’s plenary address by Mark Crispin Miller. Miller’s title, as listed in the program, was “Mediating Tomorrow’s Hi...
What follows are my notes from the first session I attended today. They’re a little sketchy and a little incomplete (I got there about 10 minutes late), but ...
Just as things in Claremont begin to slow a bit, my travel schedule picks up. I’m headed to Atlanta tomorrow morning, to attend SCMS. I’ll be speaking on a p...
Yesterday, on Invisible Adjunct, a post referencing an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required, alas), entitled “Signifyin’ at th...
ON QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
MISCELLANY REALLY IS THE LARGEST CATEGORY
ADVENTURES WITH ACCORDION GUY
THE TRIANGLE IS THE BINARY OPPOSITION OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
MY BRAIN JUST EXPLODED
The conference has been fabulous so far, but I think the highlight for me, personally, has been reconnecting with old colleagues (David Silver, Tara McPherso...
ON THE QUANTITATIVE VS. THE QUALITATIVE
What follows is the first set of what I hope to be a decently full set of entries on my experiences here at the conference. A program note: because of some o...
I’ve been watching various blogs of folks preparing for their trips to Toronto for next week’s AoIR. I’m headed there, myself, though sadly not giving a pape...
A brief return to the blogsphere, with the promise of more shortly.
My friend Alan Jacobs, a key inspiration in my return (such as it is, so far) to blogging and RSS and a generally pre-Twitter/Facebook outlook on the scholar...
Over the last couple of months, I opened Generous Thinking to a community review process at Humanities Commons. I am thrilled with how the discussion went an...
This post is likely little more than a bit of ritual throat-clearing, designed to help me get past a stage in the trying-to-write-again process in which I si...
I have once again missed my own anniversary. It turns out that June 18, the day I launched this summer’s adventure, was the day this blog turned 11.
Over the weekend, something hashtagged as #twittergate was making the rounds among the tweeps. I haven’t dug into the full history (though Adeline storyfied ...
One key problem with the blog as a platform for serial scholarship is that it’s much too easy to find yourself interrupted, to lose a train of thought.
In my last post, on blogs as serialized scholarship, I noted that a colleague of mine had posted a link to a prior post on Facebook, resulting in an interest...
Over the last two installments of this series, I’ve thought a bit about the relationship between scholarship, seriality, and the unpopular, all of which thin...
This post revolves around two jokes that I’ve heard of late, each of which has been stuck in my head since I heard it. The first joke, as I noted in part 1 o...
I nearly missed it. Again.
Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in a workshop on “Popular Seriality” put together by Jason Mittell, Frank Kelleter, and the Popular Seriality ...
A few days back, I tweeted an amusing bit of comment spam I’d received that morning:
This morning is filled with the millions of details required to get self and stuff out the door and on the road for the better part of seven weeks. It’s the ...
Collin published a fantastic post yesterday thinking through, among other things, love, writing, Roland Barthes, Etsy, and Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo. He’s had re...
I’ve just gone through and pruned my blogroll, taking a look to see who was still active (by a fairly generous definition, given my own lack of activity), wh...
Some months back, I got pharmahacked, which was a royal pain, needless to say, and which I took extremely personally. (Witness: I got hacked.) Part of what a...
A quick note: I had the opportunity to attend the Apple Education event today on behalf of ProfHacker, where I posted my reflections a bit later in the day.
I started this blog as an assistant professor, under conditions that were never fully pseudonymous but were perhaps semi-veiled, at least by the fact that ve...
So, you may have noticed that there’s a significant gap in the archives here, roughly corresponding with the summer. And you may have asked yourself, gee, is...
I got myself caught this evening in a thing that happens to me here every so often: I’ll spot an intriguing post title in my “Five Years Ago” block and click...
I’m participating in the University of Alberta-sponsored Day of DH 2011 today, and so will be posting there (and here) about some of my digital humanities do...
For the first time in the nearly nine-year history of this blog, I have failed to post here for an entire calendar month. There will forever be a gap where F...
Just to note that in the, what, four or five days since I’ve added the ReCaptcha plugin here, I’ve received a total of seven spam comments. In a similar span...
In the hopes of getting things around here moving a bit, of breaking up the logjam in my head, and of figuring out what’s ahead of me as I move on to new pro...
Today’s the first day of the eleventh annual conference of the Association of Internet Research, and the sixth of which I’ve attended. It’s lovely catching u...
For the next few days, my “Five Years Ago” block at right will be filled with post-Katrina posts. After all these years with the blog, it still feels very od...
I’m way more pressed for time than I’d like right now, finishing up a bajillion details involved in moving myself and a subset of my stuff acr...
My “five years ago today” feature reminds me that the aforementioned time has spanned since the uproar over Ivan Tribble’s infamous screed hit the Chron (now...
Among other things this weekend, I’m re-reading Fanon for Monday’s class. Fascinating to see today’s five years ago post pop up.
Um, yeah. I’m sure that’ll work.
I do not know whether to be amused by the irony or horrified by the passage of time.
Just utterly tyrannized by the to do list. Once the grading and the thesis drafts are out of the way, there are classes to prepare for, a grant proposal to b...
I’m deep in the thick of the best semester I’ve had in several years, so it’s taken some doing to pry me away from teaching in order to see what teaching-rel...
I’m ostensibly up tomorrow as host of Teaching Carnival 3.2, but poking through Delicious and Technorati is turning up little in the way of submitted materia...
If you’ve bothered coming round these parts lately, you’ll have noticed that things were loading excruciatingly slowly, a problem for which I was starting to...
I’m getting loads of comment spam of late that is not bot-produced, but rather manually added, designed to generate google juice for some commercial site by ...
I’ve just this morning upgraded to WordPress 2.7, and the nifty new interface has inspired me to actually post something. So here’s the post announcing my ne...
I did make this very short list of academic blogs, selected by the editors of More.ca, “Canada’s site celebrating women over 40.” Which is pretty cool. And m...
There was a flurry of posts a few weeks back by folks noting that they’d been included (or not) on something that presented itself as being a list of the top...
I’m sitting in a cafe down the street, the one I mentioned some days back, the one with the streaming L.A. radio station.* The other thing they’ve got is fre...
For the sixth year running, and despite having reminded myself about it two days ago, I’ve once again missed the anniversary of starting Planned Obsolescence...
I’ve noticed in my stats over the last couple of days that I’ve been getting some hits off some genuinely vile googlings, things I’m not going to reproduce h...
… since R. took off for the holidays:
I’ve read (and written) any number of blog posts over the last few years analyzing the phenomenon of meta-blogging — posts that creep up on meta-meta-bloggin...
What is it about being at home that makes me stop blogging? I posted ever so regularly during the Paris sojourn, and even managed the occasional post during ...
This was originally going to be another comment on the previous post, which I’ve been thinking about a bunch. Partially because meg seems to have gotten the ...
Somewhere, not terribly long ago, I heard or read someone make the argument that blogging was the first genuinely internet-native mode of publishing. I’ve be...
Since my migration from ExpressionEngine to WordPress, my site traffic has fallen off by something between 60 and 75 percent. I want to attribute this to the...
I swore I wasn’t going to miss it this year, as I did last year and the year before (and the year before that, and the year before that). I even went so far ...
Incidentally, if you’ve been reading Planned Obsolescence via an RSS feed, you’ll no doubt have noticed that the feed URLs have changed since the migration t...
I’m tinkering a bit with my categories, trying to make them a bit more tree-like, but given that I’ve already got two systems represented here (the old tripa...
Hey! Regardless of what my permalinks seem to tell you, that last entry was entry number 1000 here at Planned Obsolescence. It took me a little less than fiv...
I finished up the looming-deadline project a full two days early, I’m happy to report, and am now turning to other phases of my summer work. I’ve got a zilli...
Today, somebody figured out how to overcome my trackback URL randomization and leave me 20-plus spam trackbacks. All from different IP addresses.
It’s graduation day here in Claremont, and for the first time ever we’re holding the ceremony outside, where it promises to be 75 and sunny and breezy, rathe...
To say that I’ve been a bad blogger of late is to underestimate the situation pretty seriously. There have been moments, over the course of the spring, when ...
Grrr. I’m having an utterly infuriating time with air-l, one of the listservs that I’m subscribed to, because my subscription was apparently set up from my a...
Perhaps after I finish with this week’s four department meetings and two program meetings. Not to mention the departmental social event, and the conference c...
I’m apparently on something of a hiatus, at the moment. In part it’s due to the issues I last wrote about (I’m too busy for much of interest to happen, and w...
I’ve honestly just been too busy even to contemplate blogging, much less to write anything. (Or even read anything; I’m about as out of touch with bloglandia...
A bit belatedly, a post mostly serving to bookmark for myself Scott McLemee’s IHE column growing out of the MLA blogging panel, with a very interesting conve...
An MLA moment I haven’t written about, as yet: I had three and a half minutes between meetings, at one point, and so I grabbed the laptop and headed for the ...
The good news is that I get spared most memes; for whatever reason, they seem to pass me by. Liz just tagged me with this one, though, and since she complied...
Thanks to all of you who commented and emailed yesterday and this morning; sympathetic noises were much desired, and much appreciated. Yesterday’s post arose...
Happily, two other things have happened in the last couple of days that have begun to turn my mood around a bit, diminishing the stress somewhat and making i...
While the panic has subsided (in no small part due to my having woken the fuck up and said NO, thank you, to a new administrative task that I was being asked...
I’ve spent the last three days madly working on the article from which my talk at BlogTalk will be drawn. And late last night, as I was trying to fall asleep...
Except looming deadlines, and deadlines already past. I’ll be back with more scintillating thoughts soon, I hope.
So I really honestly did add them to my blogroll a couple of hours before Liz popped up in the comments, and had made a note-to-self to post an actual bloggy...
As long as I’m on the subject: one of the things that I actually have spent a bit of time worrying about — worrying, mind you, but not enough to really do an...
I’ve had a few conversations about this here website of late, conversations with folks who seem uncomfortable with the personal nature of some of what I’ve b...
I spent much of last night lying awake, primarily suffering under what I’m pretty sure was a bit of bad salmon. I wasn’t anywhere near as sick as I could hav...
Hey: this site is not your own personal publicity organ. Any future comments that are clearly serving no other purpose than promoting your work–not contribut...
So there was a piece of comment spam loitering hereabouts for a couple of days, while I debated what to do with it. I finally deleted it, as the last thing I...
So, I noted some time back that I’d built a website for my book, including excerpts from the text (the introduction and first chapter, the opening section of...
Somebody else has noted this recently — I’m sorry I can’t remember who — but spambots are getting weirdly smarter. Another blog that I have editorial privile...
I have days when I really wish this blog were anonymous, or that I had another anonymous blog in which I could write without the kind of self-censorship that...
Via unrequited narcissism, the affirmation I’ve been waiting for:
News comes this afternoon that ogged‘s taking down the shingle. Things in the blogosphere feel different to me already.
In the last few days, I’ve gotten hundreds of hits from various Canadian browsers, nearly all of whom have come from some variant on a Google search for obso...
Site design conversion in progress. Things are likely to be wonky for an hour or so, and then just… different. Change is good, folks. It’s long past time.
I’m hard at work this morning on a hefty post that I’ll hope to publish soon. In the meantime, a quick Happy New Year to you all, and a wish that all your pr...
I’ve just posted what follows on Machine, the aggregator blog from this semester’s Theories of New Media class. I’d asked the class to post concluding though...
I was never really one for drinking and dialing. Probably because I so loathe the telephone as a medium of communication.
Sigh. When I began this here blog, it never occurred to me that I’d find myself, three and a half years and 680 entries down the line, desirous of a better o...
Somebody found this site the other day by googling “fitzpatrick investigation.” And oh, man, do I wish I’d had something to do with it. Patrick may be a Fitz...
The lecture that I’m set to give tomorrow, which I’m doing some heavy-duty work on this morning, is part of a series of lectures, classes, and screenings col...
One day, you write something about a guy’s first book, and the next day, you get an email message from that guy thanking you for your comments and offering h...
Collin took the notion of “practice” that I raised on Sunday and ran with it, thinking both about the ways that academics are “disciplined” as binge writers ...
Just so you know.
So I’m wondering: have I completely alienated what little audience I ever had, such that no one’s reading this thing except for the bots and the crawlers, or...
Via meg, a new response to the Ivan Tribble column, “Bloggers Need Not Apply,”, this one published as a letter to the editor in this week’s Chronicle of High...
A moment of true confessions: I’m an obsessive stats watcher. I love knowing who’s coming in and out of here, and how long they’re sticking around. And I’m a...
I’m in a hurry this morning, needing to get myself ready to drive into LA, but I simply cannot refrain from comment on this morning’s Chronicle Careers colum...
In my stats of late, I’ve noticed a rash (read: 2) of folks whose path through the site appears to indicate that they’re trying unsuccessfully to comment. It...
About a month ago, I very, very belatedly hopped the Bloglines train, putting together a tidy pile of feeds and using them to keep up with all my favorite bl...
Here’s the thing: I’ve resisted the whole syndication wave for eons. I’ve provided various feeds for this site, mostly because the software made it really ea...
Why are my blogrolling.com pings suddenly producing database errors? There, I mean, not here. Other folks’s blogs are showing up as updated in my blogroll; i...
From my pal BT, comes word of a dangerous ripple in the blog/reality interface. A couple of weeks ago, after my back-self-patting assertion of my general roc...
GZombie wrote a few days ago about his concern that his blog had jumped the shark, and I’ve got to admit, I’ve been wondering something of the same thing abo...
So I arrived at work this morning to discover that an old class blog of mine got hit overnight with a cluster bomb of comment and trackback spam. And, alas, ...
I just received this via my pals at Educause:
Though what I really need to do, as G Zombie suggests, is lighten up on my blog reading, rather than writing, which has already become pretty desultory as it...
I’ve been poking around all day in the recent upgrade to ExpressionEngine, which I installed yesterday. The major add-on in this release is a new image galle...
Greetings from Vermont.
Here’s something odd: a screenshot of my recent keyword analysis, looking at what searches have brought folks hither, from yon.
If someone would write a script that would work with… well, let’s say, just hypothetically, a software package like ExpressionEngine, that would allow an aut...
So here’s the part where I whine a bit about the process of building yesterday’s entry. I shall do this by delineating for you the steps involved in creating...
George recently issued a plea for bloggers to make full-text RSS feeds of their sites available, such that folks who, like him, are hooked on Bloglines and o...
Invisible Adjunct is calling it quits, both leaving the academy and shutting down the blog. Having given herself a deadline for finding full-time employment,...
Sometime last night I got slammed with comment spam — more than 250 comments before I was able to stem the tide — all of which were ostensibly advertising a ...
Announcing the launch of Palimpsest, a group-authored weblog devoted to open-source teaching resources. Thanks to George for getting it off the ground.
I was going to leave this in the comments of my last post, but found myself doing so much fulminating until it seemed worth turning this into a whole nother ...
The nominations for the 2004 Bloggies are out.
I’ve been following with great interest a conversation developing over at George’s place on the possibility of creating an open-source collection of resource...
Mabel, pack up the kids. We’re outta here.
Okay, it’s not quite The End of the World, but bloggers all over are waking up to discover that their BlogRolls have been hijacked.
From The Onion, “Mom Finds Out About Blog”:
I’d been pondering what one might refer to as the Francois Question for some time —
I spent yesterday in my office, behind a closed door, listening to music through noise-cancelling headphones. Reading Habermas, on the disintegration of the ...
I’ve intended for the last couple of weeks to begin writing in here about my new project, or about my intent toward that project, in any event. Or, for that ...
…no longer has a blog. Or won’t soon, anyhow. Claiming concerns that, as he puts it, “the ecology of writing novels wouldn’t be able to exist if I’m in daily...
Planned Obsolescence has been on the road these last five days, and has had only the most tenuous of connections to the Internet. Please forgive our absence;...
I’ve been running hither and yon (mostly yon) these last weeks, and dealing with the complexities of life-in-a-suitcase, and thus failing to resume anything ...
Here’s the main issue: obsolescence. A forum for exploring it, and for producing it. A space in which to think about the intimate interrelationship of new me...
Crossposted from Platypus.
Crossposted from the Humanities Commons Team blog.
My last post, Connections, gathered a fair bit of response — enough that you can see a good example of Webmentions in action below it. There’s a little back-...
One of the instigating factors in my recent migration from my original plannedobsolescence.net domain to kfitz.info, and in my attempts to collect and reinvi...
I dropped what a friend of mine referred to as a “Twitter bomb” this morning, spurred on by a question raised by Tim Hutchings:
Earlier this week, I took a whirlwind trip back to my old New York stomping grounds, where I both had the opportunity to catch up with my colleagues at the M...
Today marks the start of my last week working at the MLA. It’s been a fantastic six years, and I’m enormously grateful to have had the opportunity to work on...
As we’ve just announced, the MLA is grateful to have received a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of the next phase of our work ...
Kevin Fitzpatrick’s monthly AT&T Wireless bill is creeping higher month by month, and unless he’s got family members on his account, he should probably s...
Sarah Bond published a column on Forbes.com this morning on the importance of not for profit scholarly networks. I’m thrilled that she mentioned not only my ...
Last week’s close attention to open access, its development, its present state, and its potential futures, surfaced not only the importance for both the indi...
I logged in to Skype for a conference call yesterday afternoon and immediately received a message letting me know that it was the birthday of someone with wh...
[Crossposted from The New York Academy of Medicine’s Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health, which has published a cluster of posts previewing ...
Weirdly, when our team said “let’s upgrade our server” got a message saying “we’re going to upgrade your server,” we didn’t expect you to redirect our DNS en...
Tim McCormick posted an extremely interesting followup to my last post. If you haven’t read it, you should.
Dear major television scholar who appeared at the very top of my Facebook feed this morning, where I could not avoid you (and I think you know who you are): ...
Over the course of last week, a huge number of friends and colleagues of mine posted links and notes on Twitter and around the blogosphere about Mike O’Malle...
For the next few days, my “Five Years Ago” block at right will be filled with post-Katrina posts. After all these years with the blog, it still feels very od...
From Ted Striphas comes news of an exciting project: the crowd-sourced production of a text-to-speech audiobook version of his fantastic book, The Late Age o...
A quick note: I’m (at least in theory) participating in today’s Day of Digital Humanities festivities. “In theory,” alas, because the conference I’m attendin...
A promo video produced by DK Books for a Penguin sales conference has gone something like viral in the last two days, getting a lot of attention in my circle...
Oh, hi! I’m sure it appears that I’ve forgotten about this blog thing. Really, it’s less that I’ve forgotten than that my attention has gotten fragmented in ...
I’ve just gotten the following email message from my friends at Time Warner Cable:
Um, yeah. I’m sure that’ll work.
I’ve noticed over the last couple of months that several of my favorite websites were becoming, well, wide. It’s become increasingly common, in fact, for me ...
You know what they say about it.
The newest episode of the Digital Campus podcast, #44 – Unsettled, is up, and I’m thrilled that it mentions Planned Obsolescence. Digital Campus, produced by...
I went to bed last night about 11.30, and got up this morning around 7.30. And inbetween, didn’t receive a single piece of email. For some reason, I’m having...
I’m deep in the thick of the chapter I’m writing on issues of preservation for digital scholarship, and am feeling fairly acutely the extent to which these i...
Otherwise, anyone might know what’s on your mind.
There’s a fantastic series of tweets in my Twitter stream right now, from folks commenting on the new Facebook terms of service, which indicates that anythin...
Having blogged my excitement about the public beta of DEVONthink 2, and trying to get myself re-organized for my winter break projects, I spent much of yeste...
I’m still running pretty much a day behind–meant to post this yesterday, but never got to it. In any event, and in a hurry:
One sure way to measure your network dependency is to live in a building in which broadband is included with your rent, and see how you respond when the Inte...
I’ve spent much too much of this weekend wrestling with a series of thorny and utterly unnecessary technical problems related to various of my websites. And ...
I’ve nearly gotten through the copy-edited manuscript, which has been a pretty overwhelming and, at moments, frustrating task. I’ve got six small queries yet...
Follow these directions:
Somebody somewhere apparently crossed the streams earlier today, and everything around here went kerflooey. Not in Claremont, at least not as far as I know; ...
Via a listserv I’m in, information about the Katrina PeopleFinder Project:
Air America has announced a service that they hope will assist people looking for missing loved ones: Air America Public Voicemail. From their announcement:
A moment of true confessions: I’m an obsessive stats watcher. I love knowing who’s coming in and out of here, and how long they’re sticking around. And I’m a...
My old pal BT passed me this musical-meme baton a while back, but I not only managed to let the damned thing drop, I kinda stopped in my tracks, hands on hip...
Just heard a story on Morning Edition reporting on a push by federal officials to force domain-name owners to identify themselves accurately in the WHOIS dat...
Here’s a sign of how spoiled I’ve become: I’m sitting in the President’s Club in the Houston airport, using the free wi-fi, and bitching and moaning because ...
On the way home tonight, I heard a DJ on KCRW refer to a new film that’s out as “a story replete with sex and cultural theory.”
The leak in my garage continues unabated, through three plumbers who can’t seem to figure out what the problem is, when I keep telling them that the leak isn...
So now that I’m back in the land of connectivity —
Thanks to all who have responded to my various technological pleas over the last few days. My hosting provider’s waning is producing massive unreliability — ...
The irony is of course that within moments of my having posted yesterday’s entry, my hosting provider’s service went down, so no one could get to the message...
Just a quick one, as I’m in the midst of enormous piles of grading that I really want done by the end of the day tomorrow: I’ve just gotten an email message ...
Why, oh why, did I decide that it was a good idea to put my computer in a different room from my television set?
I believe this to be the first weekend I’ve had to myself — sort of — in a month. “To myself,” in this case, means no conference, no travel, no grading. Iron...
I’ve been having a bit of trouble with my hosting provider — first, of course, there was that ill-timed and unannounced bit of downtime last week, which I ca...
Definitely a bang. Or maybe California just breaks off from the rest of the US and goes off to hang with Hawaii. Either way, it’s The End of the World. (But ...
I’m finding googlings in my recent referrer logs that look like this:
Accordion Guy, who not only got to attend an extended Q&A with Neal Stephenson but also won one of the door-prizes (a trip backstage to meet the author),...
I’m throwing in a link here to the color picker that everybody is linking to, mostly so I don’t forget where I put it. External memory cache, you know?
Via George comes Dictionaraoke, in which “Audio clips from online dictionaries sing the hits of yesterday and today. The fun of karaoke meets the word power ...
I’d really begun to feel a bit left out: all the cool kids were busily discussing their comment spam problems and solutions thereto, while I remained, with o...
This site has been making the blog-rounds of late, but it’s still worth playing with, for the odd poetry (and even odder critical commentary) that it’s capab...
Late this evening comes news of the death of Neil Postman, University Professor of Culture and Communication at NYU, and author of Amusing Ourselves to Death...
Part of my recent failure to be especially entertaining or enlightening here in the land of Obsolescence has to do with a smallish project that has absorbed ...
ogged dropped me a line this morning pointing me to a discussion taking place over at Crooked Timber this morning about the potential conflicts between class...
As you know, I have a new iPod. (No, this is not another gloating entry.)
I finally got my hands on my new iPod this morning, after a series of nail-biting delays. I’d paid for the two-day express shipping when I ordered it, and it...
Some of you may have noticed the new link that appeared a couple of days ago, unannounced, under “Other Obsolescence.” I’m happy to make the announcement, if...
From the good people who brought you Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers MUSHROOM MUSHROOM, comes the inexplicably-titled Scampi.
From Rory comes the Victorian Boy’s Guide to Blogging. Go forth and read it yourself, with the first verse below to entice you:
Happy consumerist techno-geek advice, that is.
Oh, the irony: at roughly the same moment that I was calling somone out in the Invisible Adjunct’s comments for what I took to be the implicit suggestion tha...
The conversation about professorial personas, professional ethics, and blogging continues over at weezBlog, where Elouise considers the question of virtual f...
I realized today that over the last weeks, I’ve begun a series of thoughts here that I haven’t fully followed through on — too appropriately, the thoughts se...
I’ve been away for a bit (as those of you reading this — and I quote — “US person’s boring memoirs about his travel trips” (ahem) already know), and since I’...
The internet cafe is a lovely thing — not this particular one, I mean, but the general development. Give the folks behind the counter one unit of the local c...
Why is it that folks who find Planned Obsolescence via net searches mostly show up in the wee hours of the night?
Having finished with the statement, and returning to the Gibson article, I’ve made the last-minute decision to accompany the Significant Other on his busines...
For years I’ve nagged my students to adopt a more critical eye toward the work they turn in to me, to refuse to be content with the first draft, to step back...
A weekend post by Liz Lawley returned me to my recent thoughts about how to integrate a group-authored blog into my fall class on the Literary Machine. Liz h...
… sort of.
Today’s second installment of what has apparently become an ongoing feature brings us further advisories, in over the transom:
As SIGGRAPH is happening practically in my backyard this year, and as I’m working on trying to get this INP off the ground (and could thus use all the imagin...
In a big hurry to get some non-blogging work done today, so I’m going to beg off by steering you all to Rory‘s thoughts on the manipulation of intellectual p...
I’m working these days on expanding a paper I gave at a recent conference, hoping that it’ll transform in the process into a draft of a chapter of the INP. T...
Since my fantastic meeting with George a couple of days ago, I’ve been thinking more about my plan to fold a group blog into one of my fall classes. George h...
Bill reports that he’s been having some difficulty loading the Planned Obsolescence front page, and this reminded me: back during our European vacation, I ha...
I’m assuming, and I think not incorrectly, that many of the folks currently reading my meanderings have read and either celebrated or despised (or some deepl...
Sorry for the no-update today, folks (as well as for the unavailability of comments earlier in the day); my hosting provider migrated the site to an upgraded...
This recent post by vika has made me uncomfortably conscious of the slowness with which the pile of books I’d planned on reading this summer is diminishing —...
Rather than taxing my heat-cramped brain by attempting to come up with a clever ‘why I’m not posting today’ post, here’s instead a smattering of July 4th pos...
One of the reasons I’m so concerned about the relationship between this site and my current scholarly work (or lack thereof) is that my new project (or, as I...
To be found here. Who knew. God love Movable Type.
I’d hoped to write something of substance today, something considering the impact that the Supreme Court’s Monday half-decision on affirmative action will ha...
I’d promised some time back to keep you posted on my adventures in the land of consumer electronics. After a bit of comparison shopping, both for cell-phone/...
According to the wire services, the Supreme Court has issued a split decision in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases, siding with the law sch...
I just discovered this morning that I missed my own one-year anniversary; Planned Obsolescence made its inauspicious debut exactly one year and two days ago,...
Yes, all you impatient readers (well, Bill), we’re back Stateside, and mostly recovered from the nine-timezone, two-day, train, plane, and automobile journey...
We’ve gone on a bit of a hiatus here, as you can no doubt tell. The hellish end of semester rituals gave way to travel preparations, which gave way to the ac...
I had a microwave. It weighed something near unto 50 pounds, and it cost me something on the order of $400 when I bought it 18 years ago. (The number of numb...
So the antenna broke off of my cell phone the other day, and I’m imagining all that electromagnetic activity, with no other focal point, penetrating my skull...
The link will tell you so.
Yesterday, when our good friends at The Morning News linked to this article in the London Observer, which reports that the Royal Shakespeare Society “aims to...
In over the transom today:
Whew… the posts just keep coming fast and furious this week. Spring break began for me today (well, yesterday, given that it’s now after midnight) at 5 pm, a...
Perhaps you’re a wholly reasonable person, with the potential to become an irrational fool? Perhaps you’re a team player, with a potentially argumentative...
The following exchange is available for your further perusal in the most recent issue of Harpers.
Well, almost.
Sorry for the protracted radio silence; we’ve been in the home stretch of a search here, and I’ve been spending an astonishing amount of time going to job ta...
The Propaganda Remix Project. Some of these are fantastic.
Am happily running the public beta of Apple’s very own browser, Safari. It’s got that groovy brushed-metal iInterface that grace all the hippest iApps, even ...
William Gibson has a blog.
Or perhaps Hunt for the Ring, by Tom Clancy. Can’t decide which is my favorite.
Remember me? I used to write stuff here, and periodically even had something to say. Alas, in the last few weeks I’ve been transformed into a committee drone...
An odd weekend: I made the mistake of reaching for a hairbrush on Saturday morning — I should know better — and was rewarded with a muscle spasm between left...
One day after Shauny‘s outcry against the ongoing horrors of the morning news, there is this: the death of Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife, his daughter, th...
I’ve been gnashing my teeth over a stupid browser problem, and bemoaning said browser’s total lack of online support, particularly of the discussion group so...
This is apparently the season of the improbable stage production here in SoCal. Two much-acclaimed works of cultural criticism (each with ties to the journal...
The new season has at last begun, and eager students are buckling down all over campus, absorbing new materials, debating new ideas, and anticipating develop...
like this.
I spent a chunk of this past weekend hanging out in my apartment, not wanting to think about either the quantity of work I have to do in the next two weeks o...
And the wonderful folks helping steer them that way: Click To Add Title. Genuinely sublime.
Inspired in part by the wonderful pulchritude, and in part by my own overindulgences, I’ve undertaken a plan of (somewhat) radical detoxing. The most signifi...
That is: unless you are committed to the survival of the people who make up and serve that institution first, foremost, and above all.
I am honored that my colleagues in the College of Arts & Letters asked me to talk a bit about digital humanities and the role that it might play in reori...
Two things that have me thinking this morning: First, the thread from Timothy Burke beginning here:
I dropped what a friend of mine referred to as a “Twitter bomb” this morning, spurred on by a question raised by Tim Hutchings:
Earlier this week, I took a whirlwind trip back to my old New York stomping grounds, where I both had the opportunity to catch up with my colleagues at the M...
As we’ve just announced, the MLA is grateful to have received a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of the next phase of our work ...
Sarah Bond published a column on Forbes.com this morning on the importance of not for profit scholarly networks. I’m thrilled that she mentioned not only my ...
Last week’s close attention to open access, its development, its present state, and its potential futures, surfaced not only the importance for both the indi...
The following is the text of a talk I gave last week at the University of North Texas’s Academic Leadership Workshop. I’m hoping to develop this further, and...
Tim McCormick posted an extremely interesting followup to my last post. If you haven’t read it, you should.
Folks, we need to have a conversation. About Twitter. And generosity. And public shaming.
I have come to despise the term “neoliberal,” to the extent that I’d really like to see it stricken from academic vocabularies everywhere. It’s less that I h...
I somewhat inadvertently made a big announcement via Twitter last night, and in so doing, as my friend Julie pointed out, sorta buried the lede. So here’s th...
Over the weekend, something hashtagged as #twittergate was making the rounds among the tweeps. I haven’t dug into the full history (though Adeline storyfied ...
One super-depressing (not least for how close to home it hits):
I’m really happy (if mildly tired) to be writing from Budapest, where (like Cameron) I’m honored to participate in a meeting on the tenth anniversary of the ...
I’ve just posted the following response to Stanley Fish’s comments about my book; they should be up once they’re moderated through. In the interim, and for t...
I’ve got a new column up at the Chronicle this morning. This one’s been in the works for a bit, and I’m really happy to have it out in circulation, and to se...
So, you may have noticed that there’s a significant gap in the archives here, roughly corresponding with the summer. And you may have asked yourself, gee, is...
The news is starting to make its way out there: I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be joining the Modern Language Association this July as the Director of Sc...
[The following article was originally published by the Society for Critical Exchange in January 2010; alas, that version has been overrun with spam comments,...
A compelling argument that it does, at See Also…, with a particularly interesting concluding suggestion:
Things are getting a bit under my skin right now. Maybe it’s exhaustion; yesterday’s travel went as smoothly as it possibly could, with some real cushiness a...
Last month, I was honored to be a keynote speaker at Re:Humanities, an undergraduate conference on digital media in academia organized by students at Haverfo...
The recent New York Times Opinionator column by Robert Pippin, “In Defense of Naive Reading”, has had me thinking for the last week or so. I knew I wanted to...
In the category of things that I used to post to the blog that now land on Twitter instead: the link. In an effort to maintain a better archive for myself, I...
My “five years ago today” feature reminds me that the aforementioned time has spanned since the uproar over Ivan Tribble’s infamous screed hit the Chron (now...
There’s a fascinating exchange around open access publishing and the reasons scholars might resist it developing right now, beginning with Dan Cohen’s post, ...
As I’ve mentioned around here a few times, I’ve been in the midst of a review this spring, and now that the results are official, I can finally say out loud ...
As I’ve mentioned around here before, I’m in the midst of a promotion review, and am in the anxious waiting phase: everything I can do is done, things are ta...
There’s been a lot of discussion in various internet settings over the last week, some of it pretty contentious, about the definition of the Digital Humaniti...
In the coming year, I’m going to be going up for a promotion review, and along with all the other attendant stress work, I need to develop a list of potentia...
I’m standing in the airport, after the usual delirious experience of waking up at 3.30 am to be ready for my 4.30 am cab. The flight I’m about to board, as u...
Cathy Davidson has an excellent post up at HASTAC thinking about the meaning of tenure and ways of imagining valid tenure standards for an increasingly inter...
Actually, I mean that in a more positive sense than it no doubt sounds. I tried a few other variants (Mouthing Off Pays Off!) but none were quite as satisfyi...
I was somewhat bemused to see the white paper recently released by the MLA, reporting to the Teagle Foundation on the goals and objectives of the undergradua...
The big news around here is last night’s announcement that the Media Studies program at Pomona, in which I’ve taught for the last ten years, and which I’ve c...
So here’s a set of research findings that have caught me completely by surprise*: women’s careers in academia sometimes stall out on the road to full profess...
There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few days of William Deresiewicz’s article in The American Scholar, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” I’...
I received a very nice and fairly apologetic note today, informing me that I was not elected to the Delegate Assembly of the MLA.
Okay, I’m in the middle of reading today’s Chronicle Careers column, and have just hit a paragraph (or two) that has me positively gobsmacked. The column is ...
From the Chronicle of Higher Education today comes an announcement of a report conducted by the University of California’s Office of Scholarly Communication ...
Ben has just reminded me of something that I meant to post, both here and at MediaCommons, after the New Structures, New Texts summit: Nature has recently an...
For the last year or so, I’ve been an extended faculty member of Claremont Graduate University’s School of Information Systems and Technology, though that af...
It’s graduation day here in Claremont, and for the first time ever we’re holding the ceremony outside, where it promises to be 75 and sunny and breezy, rathe...
One can only hope. It appears that the various crises that resulted in my protracted silence have now all passed, and that I can do at least a little, partia...
A bit belatedly, a post mostly serving to bookmark for myself Scott McLemee’s IHE column growing out of the MLA blogging panel, with a very interesting conve...
I’ve discovered something today: either I was a whole lot braver eight years ago, or a whole lot dumber. I’m giving a talk in our faculty lecture series in a...
I completely collapsed again last night, apparently not as recovered from my jet lag as I’d thought. I was dead asleep before 10 pm last night — but then wok...
Good lord, but this is depressing.
And it’s really good advice, too: how to write an academic book that folks might actually want to read.
I’m still running pretty much a day behind–meant to post this yesterday, but never got to it. In any event, and in a hurry:
So here’s what’s going on around here, that made my dream so open to Meg’s instant analysis: as I’ve mentioned before, my department has suffered some major ...
Via if:book, an interesting draft policy statement proposed by Alan Liu on student use of wikipedia. (See also the followup discussion at Humanist and Kairos...
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/167905668/ "photo sharing")[new office](http://...
This update on the strike at NYU, today, from GSOC:
This update on the strike at NYU, today, from GSOC:
Dear President Sexton,
Again, via email:
Miguel’s story has now been picked up by the Pacific News Service.
Gee, spend one little day traveling and the blogosphere goes a wee bit bonkers over some article in the New York Times about how some professors seem to thin...
Letters of recommendation.
A bibliography-in-progress, bringing together resources and discussions on electronic scholarly publishing, as well as other links useful to particular issue...
(Or, Remaking the Academy, One Electronic Text at a Time) cross-posted from The Valve:
There is something quite lovely about reading everybody’s early MLA posts and knowing that, not only am I totally not going there this year (for only the sec...
Word in this morning’s Chronicle is that Tulane University is entering a period of major restructuring as it attempts to reopen. This “renewal,” as the unive...
My doctoral institution, that private university in the public service, was at one point not too many years ago ahead of the pack in its recognition of its g...
And also because the wisdom contained therein is pretty damned good: Fontana Labs’s advice for new grad students. Even if it does contain the word “fellatio.”
Hey, could I persuade somebody to build this application for me? What I want is something that combines the functionality of something like Library Thing wit...
In the category of things I failed to blog yesterday: Bill Germano, vice-president and publishing director at Routledge, has apparently been forced out by a ...
When you completely fail to show up for dinner at the dean’s house, because you’ve written it on the wrong day on your calendar.
The thing is, it’s not that I don’t want to go back to teaching. I’m fairly well prepared for my classes, and I think they’re going to be a lot of fun this s...
I’m in a hurry this morning, needing to get myself ready to drive into LA, but I simply cannot refrain from comment on this morning’s Chronicle Careers colum...
Here’s something I wouldn’t quite have expected to see: the Chronicle of Higher Education actively making fun of an institution of… well, higher education. (...
This is a mighty busy weekend, under normal circumstances, but this weekend is decidedly not normal. Theoretically, today is Class Day — departmental recepti...
Be careful who you ask to write your papers for you.
Where is the line between being that cool professor who shows up to student events and that skeezy professor who used to be cool but still shows up to stuff?...
I just received this via my pals at Educause:
Via George (and, as he points out, a host of sources before him), the Guardian’s article, Cracks in the Ivory Towers, on problems in the academy. As George p...
I’ve arrived and checked into the Atlanta Hyatt Regency. Forgive me for what follows; it’s a deeply unprofessional conference entry, but for whatever reason,...
Word comes this morning of the death of Jacques Derrida, and the summing-up-the-career obituaries are coming fast and furious. Says the BBC:
There has been a series of conversations of late, both here and elsewhere, about the nature of academic work, whether sparked by anxieties about the impendin...
So I just got my copy of the American Literary Scholarship 2002 in the mail, and for the first time ever, I’m mentioned in it.
Michael B?©rub?© has published a brilliant reconsideration of an early run-in he had with Dinesh D’Souza, on the occasion of D’Souza’s being hired as an anal...
A listserv I frequent has, on and off, had a bit of conversation about the plight of adjuncts in the academy, and one listmember this morning posted a link h...
This entry comes with an Irony Alert, though it’s an irony more in the Alanis Morissette sense, rather than irony in the classical sense.
Invisible Adjunct is calling it quits, both leaving the academy and shutting down the blog. Having given herself a deadline for finding full-time employment,...
Gee, it’s nice to be in the news for something other than hate crimes or hoaxes thereof. This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education [subscription required] ha...
Or perhaps it would be best just to cut our losses, hold our collective breath, and just plunge on through.
The Claremont Police and the FBI have released a statement saying that they have concluded their investigation into last week’s apparent hate crime, and in s...
HATE CRIME INCIDENT ON MARCH 9TH, 2004
It’s spring break here. I’ve got a conference paper to write, and some sleep to catch up on. Things may be quiet around these parts this week, but rest assur...
Yesterday, Pomona College held a teach-in on Marston Quad, a usually-deserted lawn in the center of campus. Faculty from across the curriculum had been invit...
Coverage of events here from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the San Jose Mercury News.
Last night, sometime around 9.30, there was a knock at my door. I live in a faculty residence on campus, so I knew that this was going to be a student, but I...
It’s been some time since I’ve been able to update, as the month of February just hasn’t been a great one around these parts. There was the madness of job ca...
To continue yesterday’s thoughts: The exchange between Matt and Rory in the comments of my last post leads me to ponder the viability of a genuinely open-sou...
Dorothea Salo and Timothy Burke have both turned their sights on the state of academic journal publishing, arguing, in slightly different veins, that the mov...
Last month’s MLA-bashing controversy, which surfaced here, at Invisible Adjunct, and at Chun the Unavoidable (among other locations), quickly came to circle ...
Yesterday, on Invisible Adjunct, a post referencing an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required, alas), entitled “Signifyin’ at th...
Anxiety is a phone that doesn’t ring when it’s supposed to.
When asked, via other channels, what twentieth-century theorist I am, I should have known the eventual response:
I’ve spent a number of hours that I’m actually afraid to tally over the last week reading applications for the three jobs that my department is seeking to fi...
Via the New York Times comes news of the death of Edward Said, who had been fighting leukemia for several years.
I have just discovered something that has completely freaked me out. Ordinarily, I am pretty unfazed by the whole passage-of-time, getting-older, good-lord, ...
Thanks much to Jason for his recent entry rounding up some related thoughts at blogs around these parts and raising some interesting questions about their co...
The question of “rock-star professors” has resurfaced, in the form of a Stanley Fish article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Fish begins by quoting an ...
I did abysmally on Marcel’s People test. How did you do?
I’m a little flat today, and unlikely to find the inspiration I need for a properly ponderable post. The flatness has something to do with the heat here, whi...
Invisible Adjunct reports on Unfogged‘s pitch for a new reality series: “PhD Island.” Quoth Bob:
The conversation about David Weddle’s anti-film theory screed has continued over at the chutry experiment, and Jason and Anne‘s comments, as well as Chuck’s ...
I resisted posting on this yesterday, in part because I was so angry I couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to say. I’m still not sure I can muster a suffic...
There’s a fascinating conversation going on in two different posts on Invisible Adjunct (post 1 post 2) about the celebrification of aca...
(Crossposted from the Johns Hopkins University Press blog.)
The conclusion to the print edition of Generous Thinking directs readers to the manuscript’s open review site to share thoughts and ideas growing out of the ...
In my last book, Planned Obsolescence, I argued for the potentials of open, peer-to-peer review as a means of shedding some light on the otherwise often hidd...
It’s Open Access Week, and as befits the occasion, I’m starting it this morning by thinking about what we’ve accomplished, what obstacles we’ve found — or ev...
Oh, this this this:
I’ve been writing a bit about peer review and its potential futures of late, an essay that’s been solicited for a forthcoming edited volume. Needless to say,...
Back in the late spring of last year, I participated in a panel discussion on the future of publishing in visual culture studies, as part of the Now! Visual ...
crossposted from MediaCommons:
I’m really happy (if mildly tired) to be writing from Budapest, where (like Cameron) I’m honored to participate in a meeting on the tenth anniversary of the ...
A quick note: I had the opportunity to attend the Apple Education event today on behalf of ProfHacker, where I posted my reflections a bit later in the day.
The last talk I gave at MLA 2012 was a keynote for the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, the text of which is below. I’d love any feedback you might ha...
Some months back I received a contract from a Certain University Press for an article that I’ve got forthcoming in what’s going to be a super cool edited vol...
New rule! From this moment forward, in anything claiming to be a “discussion” of open peer review, no one is allowed to refer to the Nature experiment as evi...
According to Amazon, at least: today is the day that Planned Obsolescence has been released!
And just to round out what has been a completely insane week, an article reviewing Planned Obsolescence, including an interview with me, is up this morning a...
The news is starting to make its way out there: I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be joining the Modern Language Association this July as the Director of Sc...
I’m thinking that I’m going to start a new publishing project around here, based around a cluster of essays that I’ve written for various collections that ha...
[The following article was originally published by the Society for Critical Exchange in January 2010; alas, that version has been overrun with spam comments,...
Stuart Shieber posted an interesting and troubling analysis a few days ago of the recommendations of the Chicago Manual of Style with respect to open access ...
Back in 2006, a few months before the release of my first book, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, I launched a small ...
My friends at MPublishing have released a new issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing, guest edited by the director of the University of Michigan Press...
Over the course of last week, a huge number of friends and colleagues of mine posted links and notes on Twitter and around the blogosphere about Mike O’Malle...
Bob Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book and key supporter of MediaCommons, has posted a provocation entitled “Proposing a Taxonomy of ...
In the category of things that I used to post to the blog that now land on Twitter instead: the link. In an effort to maintain a better archive for myself, I...
I’m way more pressed for time than I’d like right now, finishing up a bajillion details involved in moving myself and a subset of my stuff acr...
[Crossposted from MediaCommons.]
What follows is a rough transcript of the talk I gave this past weekend at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses. The panel wa...
There’s a fascinating exchange around open access publishing and the reasons scholars might resist it developing right now, beginning with Dan Cohen’s post, ...
From Ted Striphas comes news of an exciting project: the crowd-sourced production of a text-to-speech audiobook version of his fantastic book, The Late Age o...
I’ve got that cringing feeling that I haven’t been getting enough work done lately, but I at least have a few links to remind myself otherwise.
A promo video produced by DK Books for a Penguin sales conference has gone something like viral in the last two days, getting a lot of attention in my circle...
Yet another month-long absence. At least this time I have a major project to show for it!
Over the course of the last year I’ve been very excitedly following the developments at the University of Michigan Press, as the press became an academic uni...
Oh. Hi there! Gee, um… long time no see.
As is being discussed a good bit around the academic blogo-/twittersphere this morning, Jennifer Howard reports in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education on a...
The newest issue of M/C, the Journal of Media and Culture, is out, and it’s focused on a topic near and dear to my heart: the Obsolete. There’s an excellent ...
I’m a bit off the grid for the next several days, but wanted quickly to draw your attention to an article by Jeffrey Di Leo published a couple of days ago at...
Cathy Davidson has an excellent post up at HASTAC thinking about the meaning of tenure and ways of imagining valid tenure standards for an increasingly inter...
Noah Wardrip-Fruin has posted a thoughtful reconsideration of the experience of putting the manuscript of his forthcoming book, Expressive Processing, throug...
crossposted from MediaCommons:
crossposted from MediaCommons:
I’ve just posted on MediaCommons in order to point to Lisa Spiro’s fantastic post rounding up and reflecting on important developments in the digital humanit...
For all the folks who’ve been asking: CommentPress is back. I also have it on good authority that a major update will be coming soon.
The SPARC Campus-Based Publishing Resource Center has officially launched today, along with the guide to creating campus partnerships around publishing issue...
If you’re a Facebook status watcher and a friend of mine, you may have seen the recent update in which I announced that I have a contract. It’s an advance co...
WordPress 2.6, which was released just a few days ago, contains expanded support for versioning of blog posts, allowing an author to see all of the revisions...
Things have been a bit quiet around MediaCommons for a while, as we’ve been working behind the scenes on a major platform transformation that should be comin...
My friends over at the Institute for the Future of the Book yesterday announced a new project, in which they’re working with the British Arts Council and Har...
As promised several days back, the proposal for the blob, below the fold. Any and all comments would be enormously appreciated. Further blobbing will follow ...
The peer review chapter that I’ve mentioned a few times of late is a key element of the big project I’ve been working on since January (or more accurately, g...
A colleague of mine recently sent me a link to the Summer 2008 issue of Kairos, guest edited by Scott Lloyd DeWitt and Cheryl Ball, entitled “The Manifesto I...
I’m back at work on the peer review chapter this morning; I started re-reading it yesterday, but was unable to make much sense of what I’d done during the sp...
While I certainly agree that reports of the ‘death of the novel’ have been greatly exaggerated, and anxieties about new media technologies and the threats...
Transformative Works and Cultures, an exciting new electronic journal (whose board I’m on) published by the Organization for Transformative Works, has just r...
Yesterday morning, as part of the new regime, I sat down and did half an hour of uninterrupted, undistracted writing, beginning the process of blocking out t...
So a pal of mine has just drawn my attention to an interesting article in the L.A. Times from about ten days or so ago on responses to the Kindle. The articl...
I’ve just found out that The Anxiety of Obsolescence has been named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2007 by CHOICE, the publication of the Association of C...
Amazon Kindle: My Writing Machines class spent a fair chunk of the week of its release discussing the Kindle, the things that make it cooler than the Sony Re...
My friends at the University of California Press and the California Digital Library project last week launched a beta version of the Mark Twain Project, an a...
Apparently this is the week when everything I’ve done for the last four months hits the metaphorical stands: today, the newest issue of Vectors was released;...
The other thing I’ve been meaning to post about: my friend Bill Tipper has for the last several months been overseeing the rebirth of editorial content at Ba...
Late last spring, I attended “New Structures, New Texts,” a very exciting one-day meeting of folks from various academic publishing units, both press-affilia...
As hinted yesterday, I spent part of last week working on a response to some reviews of The Anxiety of Obsolescence. Those reviews (five of them!), and my re...
I just got the following email message from a colleague on the far side of the country, with whom I actually haven’t been in contact in at least four or five...
From the Chronicle of Higher Education today comes an announcement of a report conducted by the University of California’s Office of Scholarly Communication ...
A while back, I mentioned the release of the Ithaka report on University Publishing in a Digital Age. Ithaka has now partnered with the Scholarly Publishing ...
I haven’t gotten to read the full report yet, but the Chronicle’s article today on the release of the Ithaka report, University Publishing in a Digital Age, ...
The Institute for the Future of the Book has today announced the release of its open source WordPress theme, CommentPress, which allows for easy online publi...
Ben has just reminded me of something that I meant to post, both here and at MediaCommons, after the New Structures, New Texts summit: Nature has recently an...
Session 4: New Economics
Finishing up the notes from yesterday’s meeting:
Session 2: New “Texts”
Notes from this morning’s first session follow. Any misrepresentations herein are solely the fault of the note taker.
I’m in Oakland for the day today, at a thoroughly exciting meeting: “New Structures, New Texts: A Summit on the Library and the Press as Partners in the Ente...
Major editorial project due June 1. Approximately 50% of work on project remains ahead of me. I hate deadlines.
About six months ago, I published a lengthy post, both on Planned Obsolescence and on if:book, about the future of peer review in electronic scholarly publis...
Right before I left for Paris and Vienna, I did an email interview with a writer from Media Life magazine who was working on an article about The Anxiety of ...
And it’s really good advice, too: how to write an academic book that folks might actually want to read.
I’m still running pretty much a day behind–meant to post this yesterday, but never got to it. In any event, and in a hurry:
Hey, this is cool: the Amazon page for The Anxiety of Obsolescence now has “Search Inside” capability. So now, in addition to the bits of text I put up over ...
(cross-posted from if:book)
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/167905755/ "photo sharing")[books!](http://www....
If you live in a market that carries Wisconsin Public Radio’s To the Best of Our Knowledge, you may be able to catch me flogging The Anxiety of Obsolescence ...
So, I noted some time back that I’d built a website for my book, including excerpts from the text (the introduction and first chapter, the opening section of...
In preparation for the release of my book (also available here and here!), which should be out in something like a month, I’ve put some of the text online. I...
The best news I’ve gotten in a long time: that the index, completed and submitted about an hour ago, is pleasing unto my publishers.
Have I mentioned, in my many rants about electronic scholarly publishing that one of the benefits of a new system such as ElectraPress would be that no one ...
I need help with a bit of phrasing, index-wise. A bit of necessary background: at one point in the book, I discuss at length the various pronouncements of th...
Which is my complete and total inability to maintain focus on the index. I am much too easily distracted.
I begin to suspect that, if anything, I’m too obsessive-compulsive for this job.
Proper names, searchability of.
Am I completely nuts for attempting to do my own index? Have any of you done any indexing? Do you have advice on method?
So the forthcoming book now has a page at B&N.com and Amazon. Which seems to suggest it’s actually going to come into physical being in the world at some...
So I spent much of yesterday attempting to compile my meager thoughts about l’affaire Frey into something halfway worthy of a post. After all, this little cr...
For some months, I’ve had a project on hold, one that I wish I’d had the time, the energy, the funding, and the general wherewithal to push forward much soon...
I got nothing more to say but this. It seems to be coming a few months later than I expected, but it’s on the internets, so it must be real. Right?
In the category of things I failed to blog yesterday: Bill Germano, vice-president and publishing director at Routledge, has apparently been forced out by a ...
Back in grad school, I did a bunch of freelance work in electronic publishing, working first for the Voyager Company, and then for Penguin Electronic. In fac...
I’d heard this was coming about a week and a half ago, but like the Jewish taboo on pre-birth baby gifts, I couldn’t celebrate it until hard copy was well in...
So I just got my copy of the American Literary Scholarship 2002 in the mail, and for the first time ever, I’m mentioned in it.
Ogged finds the country we live in mighty funny indeed, but I’ve just got to say: a world in which one person can slap together a tell-all blog documenting h...
Things are looking pretty good, from where I sit. I’ve settled into my new office, which is small by the standards of our building, but huge by any reasonabl...
To continue yesterday’s thoughts: The exchange between Matt and Rory in the comments of my last post leads me to ponder the viability of a genuinely open-sou...
Dorothea Salo and Timothy Burke have both turned their sights on the state of academic journal publishing, arguing, in slightly different veins, that the mov...
This is a difficult post to write. Every post after an unintended hiatus is hard — how to explain the absence; how to rediscover momentum — but this one carr...
Thanks much to Jason for his recent entry rounding up some related thoughts at blogs around these parts and raising some interesting questions about their co...
Okay, time to come clean. I’m in (what I most sincerely hope to be) the end stages of writing a book that focuses on this question of obsolescence, particula...
You’ve already heard that Elsevier is evil. That they know this much about you — and that they are selling this data not just to our institutions but to god-...
Spending today tinkering with a combination of ideas that have surfaced in my Mastodon feed over the last several days:
At some point in the last couple of weeks, a link passed through my hcommons.social feed pointing me to Ben Newton’s post on task-tracking in Obsidian. I loo...
This morning, I am officially kicking off the process of revising Leading Generously for final submission. As the discussions there will show, I’ve got a lot...
WP block editor gurus: Is there a way to use styles to create links that use different colors for the link text and the link decoration (i.e., the underline)...
Grounded in a model of individual success that rewards white men and the knowledge they have created for centuries, academia promotes competitiveness, exc...
Some time back, I got sooooooper-interested in the work of IndieWeb and what it might do for connecting blog spaces and social media spaces. Things have quie...
For anyone who might be looking for a bit more information on the situation at MSU, faculty senator Jack Lipton has put together an excellent video detailing...
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
My main reason for postponing the end of the world is so we’ve always got time for one more story. If we can make time for that, then we’ll be forever put...
Edited to add: Uh, whoops. Try Trentacinque Anni Fa. I am OLD.
I had the pleasure this morning of being part of an excellent townhall on digital American Studies held by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien. My a...
I’ve had two ridiculously awesome work events in the last two days, and want to share them with you, because in some ways the excitement I have about them is...
Over the last several months, I’ve regularly bugged folks on the Twitters for suggestions for a new class I’ve been putting together for this semester, calle...
For the last several years, I’ve had a daily planning routine. While I’d begun that routine in the Moleskine that was always nearby, I moved it onto my compu...
I’m in the early pages of Jenn Shapland’s gorgeous My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, which brings the methods and subjects of literary criticism and biog...
Are there skills you developed as an adult that you enjoy enough that you wish you’d picked them up when you were younger?
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak as part of a workshop held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the European Network for Cinema and Media Stud...
I’ve been wearing glasses with progressive lenses for a few years now, since it became clear that no form of contact lens-based correction was going to work ...
Y’all. I found myself really needing to make some progress on a writing project. In order to do so, I needed to clear both my head and my schedule.
Over the course of the last couple of years, I’ve spoken on several college and university campuses where faculty, staff, students, and administrators have b...
The last month has been an utter blur. We traveled for spring break, which is on the early end of things here; we left Michigan in late February for a bit ov...
A few conversations in recent days, as well as a bunch of the reading I did during my holiday writing retreat, have led me back to thinking about generosity....
This is likely to be a bit of a hike. It’s one of those posts in which some precipitating event has sent me off on a bit of an introspective tail-spin, and s...
A writer whose work I admire enormously tweeted the other day about the new book they’re working on and the joy they’re taking in it. Reading this tweet left...
I’ve been having some difficulty getting myself to focus lately. Some of the scatteredness I feel is undoubtedly situational: I have traveled four of the las...
Today started with a bang: two back-to-back meetings over coffee, each of which was filled with possibilities for extending some of the projects I’ve been wo...
I am returning, at last, to the thoughts I was exploring in my recent posts on Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community (post 1 ...
“In the book Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, Martin Luther King, Jr. told the citizens of this nation, with prophetic insight, that we would...
“To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward so...
“You know, the question isn’t whether we’re going to have to do hard, awful things, because we are. We all are. The question is whether we have to do them...
Over the years, I’ve posted a lot here about running, from chronicling my marathon training to pondering my deep ambivalence (if not flat out reluctance) abo...
I have just had one of those moments in which writing about the reasons I’m having trouble writing the thing I’m trying to write just made the thing I’m tryi...
The National Endowment for the Humanities is celebrating its 50th anniversary today. I’m joining many scholars, writers, filmmakers, educators, and countless...
There are the things you know you ought to do, that are hard to do, in part because the “ought to” of them is pretty abstract, especially when they are surro...
Yesterday was a lovely, quiet Saturday. I got up early, went through my morning routine, and then went for a walk in the park. I did laundry, I had lunch, I ...
Intermittently over the last year, I’ve found myself fumbling around an idea about critical temporalities. That is: ideas keep moving, keep developing, even ...
I’ve been writing a bit about peer review and its potential futures of late, an essay that’s been solicited for a forthcoming edited volume. Needless to say,...
I believe that I have caught myself just this side of a major case of burnout.
I honestly don’t know what’s worse: that I never knew these lyrics at all until @Karnythia linked to them in the context of #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, or th...
I’ve had an on-and-off romance with running for nearly 20 years now. I came to it late; I hated running as a kid, and I avoided it as much as I could in high...
It’s not easy to write or talk about doubts. The things we have doubts about are often precisely those things that are most important, both to us and to thos...
Lately I’ve found myself in one of those periods — perhaps we might refer to it as “my forties” — in which I’m so overwhelmed with the details involved in ju...
Folks, we need to have a conversation. About Twitter. And generosity. And public shaming.
What happened?
I find myself lately pretty continually dismayed by the frequency with which I have to acknowledge that I’ve lost my good habits. I’ve gotten out of the habi...
I’m having one of those seasons already – one minute, it’s Labor Day, and the next, it’s almost October, and it’s not entirely clear what’s happened in the m...
I mentioned yesterday that I’ve been thinking about the next Big Project. I’ve been circling it for a while, trying to figure out what several of the various...
I’ve just gotten back from a trip (about which, as I said on Twitter, I hope to be able to write soon) to find it pretty solidly fall around here. Less weath...
Today we’ve got one of those glorious mornings in New York in which you begin to feel the first bits of fall in the air. The sun is up and the temperature an...
Though my focus in writing here for the last ten years has mostly been professional, I’ve never tried to pretend that this wasn’t a personal blog. (In fact, ...
Yesterday, as I noted then, was my birthday, and it was one that I was surprised to find myself a bit ambivalent about. I haven’t really felt bad about a bir...
The Chronicle’s ProfHacker and Inside Higher Ed’s GradHacker have this week collaborated on a series of posts about productivity apps and systems. I’m consta...
I nearly missed it. Again.
I’m at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute Annual Symposium today, which has been fascinating all the way around. Perhaps the most amazing part o...
I’ve just gone through and pruned my blogroll, taking a look to see who was still active (by a fairly generous definition, given my own lack of activity), wh...
A few weeks ago, as I wrote my last post about balance as not-falling, I very much had yoga on my mind; I’d gone with a friend a few weeks before that to the...
We began 2012