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...
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life
Shhhh
Don’t let the thunderstorm know where I am.
Chicken
This, except with 2+ pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs. Four hours in the slow cooker, on high. Makes brilliant tacos.
Pulled Pork, The Remix
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...
Engage. Disengage. Repeat.
I believe that I have caught myself just this side of a major case of burnout.
On the Working Vacation
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...
Feeling My Way Through
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...
Out of the Habit
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...
Fall
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...
Time Zones
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, ...
45
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...
You Will Never Get It All Done
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...
A Constant Process of Not-Falling
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...
Oh, the Weather Outside is Frightful(ly Warm, for This Time of Year)
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...
This Morning
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...
Enough
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...
Where Am I Going, Where Have I Been
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, ...
Even Nearer
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...
Updates to Come, I Swear
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...
Tuesday
It’ll no doubt shock everyone to hear that I’ve been starkly unproductive today. Weirdly unable to focus. Distracted. Nervous.
In Memoriam
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...
Bringing It Home
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).
The News from Baton Rouge
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 Key
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...
The New Regime, Day 2
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...
New Leaf
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...
September Is the Cruelest Month
Seriously: forget April.
Deblogging
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 ...
The Happiest Person in Paris
It’s raining again! And it looks like it’s going to rain all day!
On the Brighter Side
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...
Undone
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...
Et le Quinze, Aussi
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 ...
Le Quatorze Juillet
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...
Pinxo
An email correspondent has asked about — nay, demanded — that post about the meal. I feel honor-bound to comply:
Météo
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...
07.07.07
Simply marking the moment. Carry on.
Good News, Bad News
The good news is that the mystery box has been found!
Oh Yeah, Happy, Uh…
There’s always something very odd about being in a place where the 4th of July is only… July 4.
Life in the Interstice
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...
Your Amazon.co.uk order has dispatched
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...
Updates
Sleeping: improved, but not perfect.
Un Post sur La Poste
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...
Update from Paris
In no particular order:
Home Again
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...
At Last, Almost
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...
That’s Better!
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...
The Curse of the Confidential (and the Tedious)
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...
Happy New Year!
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...
Five Things You Quite Possibly Don’t Know About Me
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...
Why I Have the Best Boyfriend Ever, In One Short Sentence
“That new haircut really makes you look thin.”
How Not to Get There
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...
And Because That Isn’t Enough…
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/307748243/ "photo sharing")[this week](http://...
Teach Thyself
Thanksgiving was lovely, if much too fast. I spent a fair percentage of it just clearing my head and attempting to improve my attitude.
Deep Breath
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...
Whew
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.
Days I Wish I Were Anonymous
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...
Guess What I Did Yesterday
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/288930565/ "photo sharing")[the haircut](http:...
Thank You, DMV!
I’m reeling. Absolutely astonished. My worldview has been shaken to its core.
A Dreary Little Tale of the Grocery Store
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...
Tick Tick Tick
Why do things like this only ever happen when you’re late?
This Is the End
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 ...
One Hundred Twelve
As in degrees.
Community Building: Just Add Fire
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...
Housekeeping
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...
Commencement
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...
Spring Break
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...
News Updates from the Land of the Shallow
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...
Yoga Brain
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...
Galatoire’s
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...
Next Year, Miracle-Ear for Everybody!
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...
What I’m Not Doing
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...
The Near-Miss
A few days ago, I came within a couple of inches of hitting a pedestrian.
Apocalypse Confirmed
I was awakened just before 1.00 this morning by one heck of a thunderstorm.
Manhole Cover Go Boom
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...
Can’t Stop That Day
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....
Go, Me
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...
On Never Feeling Like You’ve Done Enough
I’ve given to the Red Cross, and to Catholic Charities USA.
More on Those Dreams
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...
Stemming the Flood
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...
In Other News
Things I don’t have the energy to write about right now:
Folks We’re Still Trying to Find
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...
More from Baton Rouge
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...
Waiting for the Locusts
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 ...
The Parents Are In The House!
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 ...
Lake George
So they’re calling the city of New Orleans at the EPA, as reported by Wonkette:
Updates from Home
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.
From Bad to Worse, and Worse to Worser
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...
Folks I’m Still Looking For
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 Day After
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...
The Power of Suggestion
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.
Katrina
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...
Early Birds, and All That
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...
Pandering?
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...
Ways That Today Is Thus Far Much Better Than Yesterday
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...
A Quick Poll
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
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 ...
Snap Out of 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-...
Pheromones
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 ...
Less Depressed, Still Annoyed
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 ...
And What Did You Accomplish Today?
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...
Things I Saw Yesterday
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...
Twenty-One Years
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/21707200/ "photo sharing") [BRHS stairwell](http://w...
Back Down to Earth
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...
Reunited
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 —...
Marcus, They Don’t Want Us Back
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...
An Illustration, If You Needed One
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...
One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church
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...
Lines, Fine and Not-So-Fine
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?...
Confessions
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
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...
This Time, Last Year
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...
Done!
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...
How Lucky Am I?
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...
Boston Is Definitely My Kinda Town
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...
The End of an Era
Julia Child, the woman who single-handedly saved American cuisine, died yesterday at age 91.
On Not-Working
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...
Back at It
I’m upright, today, and out from under quarantine. Both of these things feel like victories.
How It Turned Out
[Part 3 in a series. Read Part 1 and Part 2.]
Reason Number One
Why I’m glad I moved to California. If it’s a choice between this:
1984
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.
Two Days Later
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...
January
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...
New Year’s Eve
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...
During the Break
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...
Memory
[Part 2 in a series. Part 1 is here.]
The Most Recent Incident
[Part 1 in a series. Read Part 2 and Part 3.]
Out of the Ashes
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...
Grand Prix
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.
A Sure Sign of the Apocalypse
Tuesday’s high temperature here in Claremont was 102 on Mr. Fahrenheit’s scale. Today it’s snowing.
Dream/Life
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...
On Busyness
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...
Where There’s Smoke…
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...
July 9, 1982
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...
travel
On the Working Vacation
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...
Summer 2013
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,...
Showers of the World
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...
Pynchonesque
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...
Ha.
In what universe did I think I was going to get any writing done on my flight?
Departure
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 ...
Itinerary
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...
Nothing to Be Done
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, ...
Homeward Bound, At Least Sorta
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...
Christmas Eve in Prague
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...
Among the Things We Saw Last Night
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#reverb10, day 22: Travel
Prompt the 22nd:
On the Road (Again) (and Again)
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...
On the Run
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 ...
The Opposition
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...
Homeward Bound
Soon, at least.
Firsts in Travel
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...
Rentrée
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 ...
M?©trique
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...
On Reviens
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...
Summer
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...
Kicked
A nine-hour time zone change in one direction, followed two days later by a three-hour change back the other direction.
Flying
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...
Solstice
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...
Update from Paris
In no particular order:
Packing
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...
But It’s Summer!
So why am I attending meetings and writing reports?
Home Again
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...
Call Me “Needle”
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.
You Have the Right to an Apology
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 ...
Sigh
Two of my favorite things in the world: spring break and Hawaii. Neither has quite panned out, this go-round.
On the Trail
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...
Halfway Back
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...
And Back Again
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...
The MLA, Thus Far
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...
It’s the Most Ridiculous Time of the Year
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...
Merry Christmas, from Prague
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...
D?©calage Horaire
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...
Waiting for the Bomb Squad*
[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.]
Deep Breath
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...
Air iPod
Apple Teams Up With Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM & United to Deliver iPod Integration.
Thank You, DMV!
I’m reeling. Absolutely astonished. My worldview has been shaken to its core.
La R?©tour
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...
ONT to IAH to CDG to VIE
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...
Guilt and Exhaustion
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...
Free of Duty
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...
Productivity, On the Road
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...
So I Totally Lied
No way I can leave it at that. Not when there’s so much more to tell.
Yeesh
I’ll just say that today was not the ideal day to fly out of LAX, and leave it at that.
Upcoming Travel
Confirmed and ticketed:
For Once, I’ve Got Nothing Whatsoever to Complain About
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...
Send Me Back to the Desert
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...
There’s a Story Behind This I’m Too Tired to Tell
Two and a half hours on the runway in Houston. Fortunately, there was beer after that.
Three Belated Notes from the Road
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 ...
Whoa.
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 ...
Get Hip to This Timely Tip
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...
Technology on the Road
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 ...
Let This Be a Lesson to You
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...
Last Gasp
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 ...
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage
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...
Inexplicably
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...
Beginning the Weekend, a Little Bit Early
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...
Homesque
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 Heart N Y
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...
Home Again, and Home Again
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...
On the Road
Yesterday:
Lingua Franca
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 ...
In Paris
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 ...
Amsterdam
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/77977358/ "photo sharing")[Amsterdam, from hotel roo...
Merry Christmas, All
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...
Free
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...
Working on Planes
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...
Recovery
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...
Fall Break, Broke
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...
Red Eye Redux
Tired, headachy, IAH, wi-fi, blah blah blah. You know the drill.
What to Do with 72 Hours at Home
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...
Thursday Morning, 4 am
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...
Headed Home
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 ...
On the Joys of the Working Vacation
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...
One of My Favorite Things
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...
Roma
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/28845650/ "photo sharing")[aqueduct](http://www.f...
Baggage Claim
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...
There’s No Place Like Not Quite Home
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...
I Lied
First, I left Santa Maria Maggiore off the litany. It should have come between the Catacombs and the Pantheon.
Litany
Spanish Steps. Piazza Venezia. Trevi Fountain. Via del Corso.
I Hate Jetlag
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...
Ply Me With Prosecco
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...
Head-Spinning Shifts in Travel Plans
Actually, my head spins in a light breeze, at this point. But this was nonetheless annoying:
Heading East
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...
Post-Red Eye
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...
IAH
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...
First, The Whining
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...
ONT to BTR
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...
MSY to BWI
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...
BWI to MSY
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...
Summer Travel
Claremont is lovely. My job is fabulous. My students are wonderful.
Same Song, Third Verse
Why, oh why, do I persist in flying through Houston?
In the Airport
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 ...
Break!
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...
More Adventures in Travel
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 ...
Merry Merry
Hear that?
For the Blessings We Are About to Receive
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...
Why Long-Distance?
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...
Goodbye, Summer
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:
The View From Here
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 ...
On Returning, Though Not Quite
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...
Just Another Day in Paradise
Internet access here in Wailea sucks. Which is the only bad thing I have to say about the place.
Back to the Origin
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...
Marcus
A quick story from the France trip that I’ve been looking forward to telling, but hadn’t quite found the right moment for:
For Liz
And courtesy of Marcus: the famous sofa-baignoire:
Headed Home
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...
In Tours
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...
Checking In
[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 ...
Up in the Air
[What follows was written at 30,000 feet. I’m no longer there, but firmly on the ground, for another fifteen minutes or so…]
I’m Not Dead Yet
But I am drowning.
SCMS-ward Bound
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...
New Year’s Eve
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...
Holidays
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...
Jet Lag
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...
Off Again
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...
Catching Up
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.
Weather Report
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...
Hiatus? Or Change of Locale?
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, ...
We Now Resume Our Semi-Regularly Scheduled Broadcast
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 ...
Veer Left
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...
But Do They Play Bar Mitzvahs?
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...
Farewell to the Palindrome
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...
On Fleeing Times Square
A brief return to the blogsphere, with the promise of more shortly.
Preparing for Re-Entry
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...
Hawaii Is Good
for many things. For getting up at 4 am since your body can still be fooled into thinking it’s 9.
conferences
Communities
[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 ...
Summer 2013
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,...
Program Committee
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...
Undergrads Reimagine the Humanities
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...
IR 11.3
Keynote Nancy Baym, “This Song’s for You”
IR 11.2
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-...
IR 11.1.4
Session 4 Networking and Social Sites
IR 11.1.3
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...
IR 11.1.2
Session 2: CMS Futures: The Way Ahead for Course Management Systems Alex Halavais, Jeremy Hunsinger, Ted Coopman, Helen Keegan
IR 11.1.1
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.
#ir11
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...
Upcoming Dates
I’ve got a bunch of talks and conferences and other things scheduled in the coming weeks:
On the Road (Again) (and Again)
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 a Press Can Add in the Age of DIY Publishing
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...
Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won’t: The Richard Rorty Archive
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...
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace
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...
#MLA09
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 ...
IR10: Peer-to-Peer Review
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…
IR10
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...
The Hybrid Future of the University Press
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...
And Then This Week
Well, I suppose that three out of six isn’t half bad:
Homeward Bound
Soon, at least.
The Future of Everything
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...
Here’s Hoping You’re Not on the Plane Yet
Just now via email:
Not Schadenfreude, I Swear
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 ...
MiT6
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.
CFP: MLA 2009
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...
Media in Transition
Incidentally, I just found out that my proposal for MiT6 was accepted; I’ll hope to see some of you there in April.
Post-Conference Post
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...
MSA
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 ...
Spring Broke
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 — ...
Second Lives
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...
Survived
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...
Open Access
One presentation in this session on open access; notes below the fold.
Scholarly Collaboration, Day 2
This morning’s first panel was on campus strategic planning initiatives.
Scholarship in New Media
Final presentation of the day, from Dan Schnaidt, below the fold.
Web 2.0 in the Classroom
Three excellent presentations in this session, below the fold.
Scholarly Collaboration in the Digital Age
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...
Keynote
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...
MLA Thoughts
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...
Another Year, Another MLA
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...
AOIR 8.3.1
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 ...
AOIR 8.2.3
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...
AOIR 8.2.2
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...
AOIR 8.2.1
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 ...
AOIR 8.1.4
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...
AOIR 8.1.3
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...
AOIR 8.1.2
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 ...
AOIR 8.1.1
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...
Internet Research, Eh?
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.
New Economics
Session 4: New Economics
New Structures
Finishing up the notes from yesterday’s meeting:
New Texts
Session 2: New “Texts”
New Directions
Notes from this morning’s first session follow. Any misrepresentations herein are solely the fault of the note taker.
New Structures, New Texts
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...
Social Entrepreneurship and Design
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...
HASTAC 1.1
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...
Call Me “Needle”
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.
Hail Fellow, Almost Met
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 ...
Report from the Blogger Meetup
Folks I’d met before, whom I was happy to see again:
The MLA, Day 2
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.
The MLA, Thus Far
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...
It’s the Most Ridiculous Time of the Year
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 Flow: Academic Publishing for the Digital Age
Notes from my session at Flow, below the fold. I’ll be cross-posting these at making MediaCommons shortly.
Notes from Flow: Watching Television Off-Television
More notes from a very interesting session of Flow.
Notes from Flow: On Taste
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...
Is “Managing” Really What We Want?
Yesterday’s presentations were overall quite provocative, and have been wonderfully blogged by Bryan, James, and Laura. There’s been a tension throughout, ho...
Open and Closed
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, ...
“A Loose Assortment of Annoying Tools”
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”...
NITLE Symposium
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...
BlogTalk Reloaded 2.3
Panel 3 Anne Bartlett-Bragg and Ricardo Cambiassi
My BlogTalk Talk
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...
BlogTalk Reloaded 2.2
Panel 1 Elmine Wijnia & Ton Zijlstra and Uldis Bojars, John G. Breslin & Alexandre Passant
BlogTalk Reloaded 2.1
Keynote 1 Rod Smith (IBM) on Mashups
BlogTalk, Day 2
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...
BlogTalk Reloaded 1.7
Panel 5: Frank Mantek and Jeremy Ruston
BlogTalk Reloaded 1.6
Panel 4: Wolfgang Zeglovits and Raymond Elferink & Graham Atwell
BlogTalk Reloaded 1.5
Keynote 2: Matt Mullenweg, “WordPress and Jazz”
BlogTalk Reloaded 1.4
Panel 3: Alexandre Passant and Suw Charman
BlogTalk Reloaded 1.3
Panel 2: Lee Bryant and Dieter Rappold
BlogTalk Reloaded 1.2
Panel 1: Adolfo Estallela and Jan Schmidt
BlogTalk Reloaded 1.1
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 ...
Other People’s Conferences, Part Two
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 ...
Other People’s Conferences
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 ...
BlogTalk
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...
Thinking about the M
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...
A Moment of Unrepentant Horn Self-Tooting
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 ...
Documenting the Self
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.
SCMS-ward Bound (2006 edition)
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...
Guilt-Free
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...
On the Conference Format
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...
AOIR 6.3.1: Scholarly Communication in the Age of the Internet
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...
A Confession
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!” ...
AOIR 6.2.3
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.
AOIR 6.2.2: Saskia Sassen
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...
AOIR 6.2.1: The Whinging Continues
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...
AOIR 6.1.2: A Moment of Whinging
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.
AOIR 6.1.1
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...
Thursday Morning, 4 am
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...
Chicago
I’ll be there. Lilia will be there. Alex will be there.
SCMS 2006
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...
Flaherty, Day Five
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...
Flaherty, Day Four
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...
Flaherty, Day Three
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
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...
Flaherty, Day Two
[UPDATE 6.14.05, 8.27 am: edit to correct stupid day/date mistakes.]
Documentary Boot Camp
[UPDATE, 6.14.05, 8.28 am: edit to correct stupid day/date mistake.]
Graduation
This is a mighty busy weekend, under normal circumstances, but this weekend is decidedly not normal. Theoretically, today is Class Day — departmental recepti...
Greeting from the Panopticon
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,...
Atlanta Bound
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...
A Vermont of the Mind
Greetings from Vermont.
AOIR 5.2: Not Enough Less Grouchy to Really Be Posting
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...
AOIR 5.1
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...
AOIR 5.0
Off to Sussex. More from there, as connectivity allows.
SCMS, Day 2
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...
The Scariest Plenary Ever
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...
SCMS, Day 1
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 ...
SCMS-ward Bound
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...
MLA and the Single Girl
Yesterday, on Invisible Adjunct, a post referencing an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required, alas), entitled “Signifyin’ at th...
AoIR 4.4.1
ON QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
AoIR 4.3.2
MISCELLANY REALLY IS THE LARGEST CATEGORY
AoIR 4.3.1
ADVENTURES WITH ACCORDION GUY
AoIR 4.2.3
THE TRIANGLE IS THE BINARY OPPOSITION OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
AoIR 4.2.2
MY BRAIN JUST EXPLODED
AoIR 4.2.1
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...
AoIR 4.1.2
ON THE QUANTITATIVE VS. THE QUALITATIVE
AoIR 4.1.1
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...
AoIR
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...
On Fleeing Times Square
A brief return to the blogsphere, with the promise of more shortly.
blogging
Why Not Blog?
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...
What's New
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...
I Am Not Blogging
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...
Eleven
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.
Advice on Academic Blogging, Tweeting, Whatever
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 ...
Last Season, on Planned Obsolescence
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.
Reader Response, in Theory
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...
Blogs as Serialized Scholarship
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...
The Unpopular
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...
Ten
I nearly missed it. Again.
Unpopular Seriality
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 ...
Annals of Comment Spam
A few days back, I tweeted an amusing bit of comment spam I’d received that morning:
Departure
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 ...
Shamelessness
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 Has a Sad
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...
Rearranging the Deck Chairs
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...
iBooks, Authoring, Education, and So Forth
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 Public Scholar’s Two Bodies
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...
Hey, Why the Silence?
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 Miss Blogging
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...
Day of DH 2011
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...
The Disappearing Month
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...
A Brief Technical Aside
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...
#reverb10
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...
#ir11
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...
Past and Future
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...
Anthologize
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...
Five Years Post-Tribble
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...
And Then Five Years Later
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.
FTC, Blog Regulator
Um, yeah. I’m sure that’ll work.
Five Years Later
I do not know whether to be amused by the irony or horrified by the passage of time.
Not Dead Yet
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...
Teaching Carnival 3.2
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...
Teaching Carnival, TK
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...
Grrrr
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...
Commenting Policy
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 ...
New Toys
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...
On the Other Hand
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...
Hrmph
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...
iPhonery
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...
Whoops, Vol. VI
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...
Why I Hate Hackers Right Now
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...
Two Things I Have Decided
… since R. took off for the holidays:
At the Blogging Crossroads
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...
Deblogging
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 ...
Blogging: Firstborn or Second Coming?
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 ...
Again with the Blegging
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...
Where Is Everybody?
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...
Five
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 ...
Feed Me!
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...
Categories
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...
One Thousand One
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...
Blog, Dammit
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...
Trackbacks, R.I.P.
Today, somebody figured out how to overcome my trackback URL randomization and leave me 20-plus spam trackbacks. All from different IP addresses.
Graduation Day
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...
Reserves? Depleted
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 ...
On the Ethics of Class Blogs
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...
Gosh, Is She Ever Going to Start Blogging Again?
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...
Admitting the Obvious
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’m Not Dead Yet!
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...
Against Phalloblogocentrism
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...
Hail Fellow, Almost Met
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 ...
Five Things You Quite Possibly Don’t Know About Me
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...
/whine
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...
Meeting Aunt B.
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...
Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Likely to Be
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...
Imminent BlogTalk
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...
I Got Nothing
Except looming deadlines, and deadlines already past. I’ll be back with more scintillating thoughts soon, I hope.
Former Students Make Good
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...
Potty Mouth
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...
Back to (Professional) Life
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...
To Delete, or Not to Delete
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...
New Editorial Policy
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...
New Comment Spam M.O.
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...
Why I Am Too Dumb to Lead the Network Revolution
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...
Spambot University Library
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...
The Silence
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...
Not a Loser, Thank You Very Much
Via unrequited narcissism, the affirmation I’ve been waiting for:
Say Goodbye
News comes this afternoon that ogged‘s taking down the shingle. Things in the blogosphere feel different to me already.
So What’s Up in Canada, Eh?
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...
Pardon Our Dust
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.
Two Thousand Six
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...
Notes on Class Blogging
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...
Ergh
I was never really one for drinking and dialing. Probably because I so loathe the telephone as a medium of communication.
Category Mistake
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...
I Only Wish
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...
Blog as Narrative Archive
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...
Some Things I Love About the Internet
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...
More on Practice
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 ...
By the By
Just so you know.
crickets
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...
Hear, Hear!
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...
Stats Watching
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...
Bloggers Need Not Apply
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...
Commenting Trouble?
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...
How RSS Killed My Blog
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...
Probably the Dumbest Tech-Related Question Ever
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...
Blogrolling Problem
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...
I Do Rock Hard, But Not That Hard
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...
The State of the Blog
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...
This Is Not What I Need
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, ...
Newsflash: Blogs Moving into Academia!
I just received this via my pals at Educause:
Why Things Might Be a Little Quiet Around Here for the Next Few Days, Gods Willing
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...
New Feature: Gallery
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...
A Vermont of the Mind
Greetings from Vermont.
More Meta-Blogging
Here’s something odd: a screenshot of my recent keyword analysis, looking at what searches have brought folks hither, from yon.
You Know What Would Be Cool?
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...
Photoblogging the Old-Fashioned Way
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...
An Open Letter to All Those Blogging Folks I Love to Read
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...
Saying Goodbye
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,...
Oh, That’s Just Charming
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 ...
Palimpsest
Announcing the launch of Palimpsest, a group-authored weblog devoted to open-source teaching resources. Thanks to George for getting it off the ground.
Open Foot, Insert Mouth
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 ...
Once Again, Ignored by the Academy
The nominations for the 2004 Bloggies are out.
Sharing Teaching Resources
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...
The Last Days of Blogging
Mabel, pack up the kids. We’re outta here.
WTF???
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.
I Didn’t See the Danger
From The Onion, “Mom Finds Out About Blog”:
Prenez La Chance
I’d been pondering what one might refer to as the Francois Question for some time —
After the Silence
I spent yesterday in my office, behind a closed door, listening to music through noise-cancelling headphones. Reading Habermas, on the disintegration of the ...
On Not Writing
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 ...
William Gibson…
…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...
Me & Charlie Kurault
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;...
Coming Soon…
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 ...
Opening Day
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...
networks
Infrastructure and Capacity Building
Crossposted from Platypus.
Scholars, It’s Time to Take Control of Your Online Communities
Crossposted from the Humanities Commons Team blog.
Feeds and Gardens
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-...
Connections
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...
On Developing Networked Communities
I dropped what a friend of mine referred to as a “Twitter bomb” this morning, spurred on by a question raised by Tim Hutchings:
The Commons and the Common Good
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...
Parting Gifts
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...
Sustainability
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 ...
Things I Have Learned from Other People’s Use of My Email Address
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...
Reading, Privacy, and Scholarly Networks
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 ...
Academia, Not Edu
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...
Birthday Skype?
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...
Communities
[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 ...
Dear Hosting Provider
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...
Disagreement
Tim McCormick posted an extremely interesting followup to my last post. If you haven’t read it, you should.
Spoilerz!
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): ...
Peer-to-Peer Review and Its Aporias
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...
Past and Future
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...
The Late Age of Print, Audio Edition
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...
Day of Digital Humanities
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...
The Future of Publishing?
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...
My Secret Life
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 ...
Gee, Time Warner, Thanks for Asking
I’ve just gotten the following email message from my friends at Time Warner Cable:
FTC, Blog Regulator
Um, yeah. I’m sure that’ll work.
The Rise of the Landscape Web
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 ...
The Waiting…
You know what they say about it.
Digital Campus
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...
Something’s… Not… Right…
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...
Blegging: Preservation
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...
Checked Your Privacy Settings Lately?
Otherwise, anyone might know what’s on your mind.
My New TOS
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...
More Fun with Software
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...
Cyberinfrastructure and the Humanities
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:
Twelve Steps Will Not Cut It
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...
Tinkering
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 ...
An Argument in Favor of the Digitization of the Library
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...
Activism for the Radically Lazy
Follow these directions:
Oops.
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; ...
The Katrina PeopleFinder Project
Via a listserv I’m in, information about the Katrina PeopleFinder Project:
Air America Public Voicemail
Air America has announced a service that they hope will assist people looking for missing loved ones: Air America Public Voicemail. From their announcement:
Stats Watching
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...
Wherein I Actually Complete One of Those Meme Thingies
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...
On the Internet, Everybody Knows You’re a Dog
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...
In the Airport
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 ...
Almost Familiar
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.”
Leaky
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...
Monday Morning Condo Blogging, vol. 5
So now that I’m back in the land of connectivity —
Update
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 — ...
Take Two
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...
Request for Hosting Recommendations
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 ...
Convergence, Please!
Why, oh why, did I decide that it was a good idea to put my computer in a different room from my television set?
Weekend
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...
Troubleshooting
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...
A Bang or a Whimper?
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 ...
The M.O. of the Comment Spammer?
I’m finding googlings in my recent referrer logs that look like this:
Welcome to Toronto. Stick Out Your Tongue and Say “Ah.”
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),...
That Color Picker
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?
Dictionaraoke
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 ...
On Comment Spam
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...
Lost in Translation
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...
Neil Postman
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...
What Is Media Studies?
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 ...
Blogs, Teaching, and Privacy
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...
I Need Suggestions
As you know, I have a new iPod. (No, this is not another gloating entry.)
New Toy
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...
Unveiling the Literary Machine
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...
I Apologize in Advance
From the good people who brought you Badgers Badgers Badgers Badgers MUSHROOM MUSHROOM, comes the inexplicably-titled Scampi.
Things I Wish I Had Written, Part 1
From Rory comes the Victorian Boy’s Guide to Blogging. Go forth and read it yourself, with the first verse below to entice you:
I Need Advice
Happy consumerist techno-geek advice, that is.
Hey, Kettle? It’s Pot. You’re Black.
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...
On Education, Blogs, and Other Ranting
The conversation about professorial personas, professional ethics, and blogging continues over at weezBlog, where Elouise considers the question of virtual f...
Distraction
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...
Ouch.
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’...
In the Internet Cafe
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...
Recent Googlings
Why is it that folks who find Planned Obsolescence via net searches mostly show up in the wee hours of the night?
On the Geography of Blogging
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...
On Rewriting
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...
Blogging and the Classroom, Redux
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...
And We’re Back…
… sort of.
Dear W.A.S.T.E. (2.0)
Today’s second installment of what has apparently become an ongoing feature brings us further advisories, in over the transom:
SIGGRAPH, Anyone?
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...
Scholarly Publishing, Copyright, and the Web
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...
Lost in Space
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...
Blogging and the Classroom
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...
Quick Tech Question
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...
Welcome, Sven!
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...
Unplanned Absence
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...
On Reading Slowly
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 —...
Independence Day
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...
Future Writing
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...
Hey, I’ve Got an RSS Feed!
To be found here. Who knew. God love Movable Type.
Amidst the Gnashing of Teeth
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...
And the Winner Is…
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/...
Split Decision
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...
Oops.
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,...
Eerste Things Eerste
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...
Obsolete and Away
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...
Adventures in Technology, Part Two
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...
Can You Hear Me Now?
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...
How You Know Postmodernism Is Dead
The link will tell you so.
SimShakespeare
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...
Dear W.A.S.T.E.
In over the transom today:
Why Not Attack Evilania?
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...
Meetings: None of Us Is as Dumb as All of Us
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...
Whether You Like It Or Not
The following exchange is available for your further perusal in the most recent issue of Harpers.
Back from the Undead
Well, almost.
Unplanned Absence
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...
Information Security Begins With You!
The Propaganda Remix Project. Some of these are fantastic.
I’m Gonna Take You on a Surfin’… Oh, You Know
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 ...
I Never Was a Technical Guy, and Never Will Be*
William Gibson has a blog.
A Passage to Mordor, by E. M. Forster
Or perhaps Hunt for the Ring, by Tom Clancy. Can’t decide which is my favorite.
Um… Is This Thing On?
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...
Deconstruction
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...
The News Just Keeps Getting Worse
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...
Arrgh.
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...
What’s Next? “Postmodernism! The Musical”?
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...
Back to School
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...
I Need a 404 Page
like this.
Hmmm…
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...
Technologies We’d Like to See Become Obsolete
And the wonderful folks helping steer them that way: Click To Add Title. Genuinely sublime.
Them Singin’, Dancin’ Demons Do It Every Time
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...
academia
Your Institution Does Not Deserve to Survive
That is: unless you are committed to the survival of the people who make up and serve that institution first, foremost, and above all.
Behind the Will
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...
Stars
Two things that have me thinking this morning: First, the thread from Timothy Burke beginning here:
On Developing Networked Communities
I dropped what a friend of mine referred to as a “Twitter bomb” this morning, spurred on by a question raised by Tim Hutchings:
The Commons and the Common Good
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...
Sustainability
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 ...
Reading, Privacy, and Scholarly Networks
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 ...
Academia, Not Edu
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...
Evolving Standards and Practices in Tenure and Promotion Reviews
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...
Disagreement
Tim McCormick posted an extremely interesting followup to my last post. If you haven’t read it, you should.
If You Can’t Say Anything Nice
Folks, we need to have a conversation. About Twitter. And generosity. And public shaming.
“Neoliberal”
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...
Moving On
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...
Advice on Academic Blogging, Tweeting, Whatever
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 ...
Two Things
One super-depressing (not least for how close to home it hits):
Open Access at 10
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 ...
Response to Stanley Fish
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...
Do the Risky Thing
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...
Hey, Why the Silence?
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...
Moves and Updates
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...
On Open Access Publishing
[The following article was originally published by the Society for Critical Exchange in January 2010; alas, that version has been overrun with spam comments,...
Does Tenure Undermine Academic Freedom?
A compelling argument that it does, at See Also…, with a particularly interesting concluding suggestion:
<rant>
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...
Undergrads Reimagine the Humanities
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...
On the Impossibility of Naive Reading
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...
To Read: How Not to Run a University Press
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...
Five Years Post-Tribble
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...
Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values (part three)
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, ...
A Little (Self-)Promotion
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 ...
This One Goes to 11
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...
The Stakes of Disciplinarity
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...
Senioring a Young Field
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...
The Opposition
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...
Must Read: HASTAC/MLA Rethinking Tenure Guidelines
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...
The Wages of Mouthing Off
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...
Media Studies and Literary Studies
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...
Department
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...
Service
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...
On Elite Education
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’...
No, Seriously
I received a very nice and fairly apologetic note today, informing me that I was not elected to the Delegate Assembly of the MLA.
Private Communications
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 ...
In Theory…
From the Chronicle of Higher Education today comes an announcement of a report conducted by the University of California’s Office of Scholarly Communication ...
Precedings
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...
Social Entrepreneurship and Design
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...
Graduation Day
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...
Back to Life?
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...
Against Phalloblogocentrism
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...
Faculty Lecture
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...
Panic, or Something Close to It
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...
Graduate Employee Strike Abandoned
Good lord, but this is depressing.
Free Advice from Aunt B.
And it’s really good advice, too: how to write an academic book that folks might actually want to read.
Cyberinfrastructure and the Humanities
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:
The Key to the Dream, In Case You Care
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 ...
Student Use of Wikipedia
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...
Moves
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/167905668/ "photo sharing")[new office](http://...
Another Update from GSOC
This update on the strike at NYU, today, from GSOC:
An Update from GSOC
This update on the strike at NYU, today, from GSOC:
A Long-Overdue Open Letter to John Sexton
Dear President Sexton,
Further Update
Again, via email:
Update
Miguel’s story has now been picked up by the Pacific News Service.
Shouting Down a Well
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...
You Know What You Can’t Take a Sabbatical From?
Letters of recommendation.
More on Electronic Scholarly Publishing
A bibliography-in-progress, bringing together resources and discussions on electronic scholarly publishing, as well as other links useful to particular issue...
On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements
(Or, Remaking the Academy, One Electronic Text at a Time) cross-posted from The Valve:
Guilt-Free
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...
Tulane
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...
On Strike at NYU
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...
Just to Show Ogged I’m No Prude
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.”
Academic Social Software Wish List
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...
The Last Days of Academic Publishing
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 ...
Days When It’s A Good Thing You’ve Got Tenure
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.
Denial
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...
Bloggers Need Not Apply
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...
Snark and the Chronicle
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. (...
Graduation
This is a mighty busy weekend, under normal circumstances, but this weekend is decidedly not normal. Theoretically, today is Class Day — departmental recepti...
And the Moral of the Story Is
Be careful who you ask to write your papers for you.
Lines, Fine and Not-So-Fine
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?...
Newsflash: Blogs Moving into Academia!
I just received this via my pals at Educause:
The State of the Profession
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...
Greeting from the Panopticon
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,...
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
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:
What Counts
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...
Dude, I’m (Almost) Famous!
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.
The Myth of the Persecuted Campus Conservative
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...
Oy.
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...
Visibility, of a Sort
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.
Saying Goodbye
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,...
On the Campus Center
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...
Can I Take a Mulligan on This Semester?
Or perhaps it would be best just to cut our losses, hold our collective breath, and just plunge on through.
I Honestly Don’t Know What to Say
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...
Press Release
HATE CRIME INCIDENT ON MARCH 9TH, 2004
And Not a Moment Too Soon
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...
What I Would Have Said
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...
In the News
Coverage of events here from the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the San Jose Mercury News.
More, and Worse
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...
What’s Been Going On
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...
On Publishing and the Public
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...
On the Future of Academic Publishing
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...
Difficulty, Professionalism, and Literary Studies
Last month’s MLA-bashing controversy, which surfaced here, at Invisible Adjunct, and at Chun the Unavoidable (among other locations), quickly came to circle ...
MLA and the Single Girl
Yesterday, on Invisible Adjunct, a post referencing an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required, alas), entitled “Signifyin’ at th...
Definitions
Anxiety is a phone that doesn’t ring when it’s supposed to.
How Do You Make Yourself a Body-Without-Organs?
When asked, via other channels, what twentieth-century theorist I am, I should have known the eventual response:
Now That’s a Cover Letter
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...
RIP, Edward Said
Via the New York Times comes news of the death of Edward Said, who had been fighting leukemia for several years.
How Old Am I?
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, ...
Peer-Review
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...
Rock-Star
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 ...
The Qualifying Exam Meets the Cult of Personality
I did abysmally on Marcel’s People test. How did you do?
On the “Personal Statement”
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...
Outlast. Outplay. Outtheorize.
Invisible Adjunct reports on Unfogged‘s pitch for a new reality series: “PhD Island.” Quoth Bob:
On the Humanities, in Theory
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 ...
“Film Theory Has Nothing to Do With Film.”*
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...
Academic Superstardom (and Its Costs)
There’s a fascinating conversation going on in two different posts on Invisible Adjunct (post 1 post 2) about the celebrification of aca...
publishing
Listening as Generous Thinking
(Crossposted from the Johns Hopkins University Press blog.)
More on GT: Comments Reopened
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 ...
Community Review
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...
Opening Up Open Access
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...
The Political Economics of Open Access
Oh, this this this:
Tools and Values
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,...
Future Publishing
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 ...
Open Review: A Study of Contexts and Practices
crossposted from MediaCommons:
Open Access at 10
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 ...
iBooks, Authoring, Education, and So Forth
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.
Giving It Away: Sharing and the Future of Scholarly Communication
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...
Adventures in Publishing Contracts
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...
Open Peer Review: New Rule
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...
Today’s (Apparently) the Day
According to Amazon, at least: today is the day that Planned Obsolescence has been released!
Inside Higher Ed
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...
Moves and Updates
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 Never-Appeared
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...
On Open Access Publishing
[The following article was originally published by the Society for Critical Exchange in January 2010; alas, that version has been overrun with spam comments,...
On the Scholarly Press, the Manual of Style, and Intellectual Property
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 ...
Relaunching The Anxiety of Obsolescence
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 ...
The Future of the University Press
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...
Peer-to-Peer Review and Its Aporias
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...
The Stein Taxonomy
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 ...
To Read: How Not to Run a University Press
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...
Anthologize
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...
MediaCommons, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Open Review
[Crossposted from MediaCommons.]
What a Press Can Add in the Age of DIY Publishing
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...
Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values (part three)
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, ...
The Late Age of Print, Audio Edition
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...
Two Bits of Recent Work
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.
The Future of Publishing?
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...
Shakespeare Quarterly Open Review
Yet another month-long absence. At least this time I have a major project to show for it!
UM/HASTAC Publication Prize
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...
Um… Is This Thing On?
Oh. Hi there! Gee, um… long time no see.
The Cost of Peer Review and the Future of Scholarly Publishing
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...
Obsolete
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 ...
Against Anonymity
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...
Must Read: HASTAC/MLA Rethinking Tenure Guidelines
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...
Blog-Based Peer Review
Noah Wardrip-Fruin has posted a thoughtful reconsideration of the experience of putting the manuscript of his forthcoming book, Expressive Processing, throug...
University Press + University Library = The Future of University Publishing?
crossposted from MediaCommons:
Getting Serious About the Online Part of Research Online
crossposted from MediaCommons:
Digital Humanities Roundup
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...
CommentPress
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.
Campus-Based Publishing
The SPARC Campus-Based Publishing Resource Center has officially launched today, along with the guide to creating campus partnerships around publishing issue...
The Contract
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...
Versioning
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...
The Future of Citations
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...
The Golden Notebook(s)
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...
Planned Obsolescence: The Proposal
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 Blob
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...
This Is Scholarship
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...
Planned Obsolescence, Scholarly Publishing, and Peer Review
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...
Response to “Electronic Media, Identity Politics, and the Rhetoric of Obsolescence”
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
Transformative Works and Cultures, an exciting new electronic journal (whose board I’m on) published by the Organization for Transformative Works, has just r...
Peer Review
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...
Kindle, Part Two
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...
Outstanding
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...
Things I’ve Missed Commenting Upon While the Urge to Blog Has Been More or Less Absent, Part 1
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...
Mark Twain Project
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...
My Week in Publishing
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 Return of the Review
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...
CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts
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...
RCCS Reviews
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...
Marketing
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...
In Theory…
From the Chronicle of Higher Education today comes an announcement of a report conducted by the University of California’s Office of Scholarly Communication ...
“University Publishing in a Digital Age,” in a Digital Age
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 ...
University Publishing in a Digital Age
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, ...
CommentPress
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...
Precedings
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...
New Economics
Session 4: New Economics
New Structures
Finishing up the notes from yesterday’s meeting:
New Texts
Session 2: New “Texts”
New Directions
Notes from this morning’s first session follow. Any misrepresentations herein are solely the fault of the note taker.
New Structures, New Texts
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...
Procrastination
Major editorial project due June 1. Approximately 50% of work on project remains ahead of me. I hate deadlines.
The Failure of Open Peer Review?
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...
Media Life
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 ...
Free Advice from Aunt B.
And it’s really good advice, too: how to write an academic book that folks might actually want to read.
Cyberinfrastructure and the Humanities
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:
Search Inside
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 ...
On the Future of Peer Review in Electronic Scholarly Publishing
(cross-posted from if:book)
Okay, Now I Believe It
[](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kqf/167905755/ "photo sharing")[books!](http://www....
More on That Book
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 ...
Why I Am Too Dumb to Lead the Network Revolution
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...
The Anxiety of Obsolescence
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...
Now to Commence the Lying Around Reading Novels Portion of Our Program
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.
Yes, Still
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 ...
Indexing Bleg
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...
And Then There’s the Other Problem
Which is my complete and total inability to maintain focus on the index. I am much too easily distracted.
The Anxiety of Indexing
I begin to suspect that, if anything, I’m too obsessive-compulsive for this job.
Indexing
Proper names, searchability of.
More Non-Rhetorical Questions
Am I completely nuts for attempting to do my own index? Have any of you done any indexing? Do you have advice on method?
Anxiety, Obsolescence, Etc.
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...
Frey Them!
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...
Back to the Future
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...
Yippee!
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?
The Last Days of Academic Publishing
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 ...
Byron Preiss
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...
Update Number Two: The Contract
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...
Dude, I’m (Almost) Famous!
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.
In Which I Lose My Cool, and Succumb to a Fit of Pique
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...
Looking Up
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...
On Publishing and the Public
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...
On the Future of Academic Publishing
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...
In the Interim
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...
Peer-Review
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...
True Confessions
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...
reflecting
Hotel Elsevier
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-...
Birdsite
Spending today tinkering with a combination of ideas that have surfaced in my Mastodon feed over the last several days:
Tasks Matter
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...
Revising
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...
Block Editor Question
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)...
García Peña, Community as Rebellion
Grounded in a model of individual success that rewards white men and the knowledge they have created for centuries, academia promotes competitiveness, exc...
ActivityPub
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...
Timeline of Events
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...
A Tale of Two Transitions
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Krenak, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World
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...
Venticinque Anni Fa
Edited to add: Uh, whoops. Try Trentacinque Anni Fa. I am OLD.
Revisiting Neoliberal Tools
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...
What Is This Meeting For?
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...
#ENG818
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...
Plans
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...
Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
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...
In the Swim
Are there skills you developed as an adult that you enjoy enough that you wish you’d picked them up when you were younger?
Opening Up Peer Review
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...
Focus
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 ...
Retreat
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.
Generosity in Hard Times
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...
Isolation, Mission, Connection
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...
Generosity, Humility, Vulnerability
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....
Loss, Shame, Validation, and Work
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...
Self-Assessment
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...
Focus
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...
Looking Forward
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...
On Generosity and Obligation
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 ...
Chaos or Community
“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...
Murkier and Unknown
“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...
Hard, Awful Things
“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...
Not-Running
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...
Meta
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 NEH at 50
The National Endowment for the Humanities is celebrating its 50th anniversary today. I’m joining many scholars, writers, filmmakers, educators, and countless...
Must
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...
Attention
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 ...
Being Wrong
Intermittently over the last year, I’ve found myself fumbling around an idea about critical temporalities. That is: ideas keep moving, keep developing, even ...
Tools and Values
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,...
Engage. Disengage. Repeat.
I believe that I have caught myself just this side of a major case of burnout.
UGH.
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...
Running
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...
Doubts
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...
Productivity and Goofing Off
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...
If You Can’t Say Anything Nice
Folks, we need to have a conversation. About Twitter. And generosity. And public shaming.
Warming Up
What happened?
Out of the Habit
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...
Slow. Down.
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...
The Shape of Thought
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...
Making Room
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...
Fall
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...
Time Zones
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, ...
45
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...
You Will Never Get It All Done
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...
Ten
I nearly missed it. Again.
Elbow, Wrist, Fingers, Pen, Words
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 Has a Sad
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...
Intention
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...
Happy New Year!
We began 2012