Nicholas D. Kristof, writing in last Sunday’s New York Times, “Death By Gadget,” describes how “[a]n ugly paradox of the 21st century is that some of our elegant symbols of modernity — smartphones, laptops and digital cameras — are built from minerals that seem to be fueling mass slaughter and rape in Congo.” Our digital [...]
Attention Facebook Customers:
This may come as a shock to some of you–Facebook is a commercial business.
Facebook is not a nation state. It does not have a constitution or a supreme court that guarantees you a “right to privacy.”
In exchange for allowing us to dance around the Bonfire of the Banalities, Facebook uses data that we voluntarily [...]
At a conference of scholars (mostly historians) on the Oldest State of the South. . .
Uniformity. Unlike MLA meetings where blue jeans or black on black on black (with black Euro eyewear) prevails, the uniform of the day is the blue blazer and khaki pants (mostly men, but sometimes unisex). Depicted below, my uniformity: blue [...]
One of the things that I enjoy about attending scholarly conferences is hearing about scholars’ passions, their intellectual passions, that is.
So last night at a reception, I learned from S. J. Wolfe about the robust trade in linen mummy wrappings to feed America’s hunger for fine rag-content paper in the 19th and early 20th centuries. [...]
I’m at a scholarly conference at a small college with big pretensions, where Christian Lander could add to his list of Stuff White People Like: strip-mall neo-Colonial or convention hotel neo-Georgian architecture.
In this case, this college started out as a junior college extension of Oldest Southern College, declared its independence, got a makeover with a [...]
Google, the online data monopoly that drew ire of human rights activists when it decided several years ago to agree to filter Chinese searches in order to strike a deal with the government of the Republic of China (a totalitarian political system), has now threatened to withdraw from China after Google’s email systems were hacked [...]
The last day of MLA’s annual convention. The conference has appeared in local and national news media, as always at this time of year, though this year the headlines have seemed less preoccupied with presenters’ clever or controversial paper titles and more on the deleterious effects of the grim economy and the challenges of digital [...]
Reunions
Many spontaneous reunions occur at MLA, some planned, most serendipitous. I bump into Bob and Sylvia Scholnick (College of William & Mary) on the train. Attending Bob’s session that night, I catch up with John Miller (Longwood University) whose dissertation director was Bob Scholnick. I stop to say “Hi” to Richard Dellamora outside the Loews [...]
Council of Editors of Learned Journals Meetings
At the conclusion of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) awards ceremony today, outgoing (in both senses of that term) CELJ president, Bonnie Wheeler (editor of Arthuriana), addressed several recurring questions of journal editors in recent years, particularly related to ownership and credentialing.
What constitutes a “learned journal,” [...]
TheLongView began two years ago this week (thanks to my brother Jim Long’s birthday gift to me of the domain name and a Christmas gift later in the year of the Web server and blog design and setup) with my blogging on the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in Chicago in 2007.
So like salmon we [...]
David Brooks invites us to turn off the TV (or turn off the iPhone, the Wii, the iPod, YouTube, &c.) in order to read a long-form published essay, in his annual Sidney Awards.
Among the topics healthcare leads the list, but also American (in)justice, local DC politics (in the person of Marion Barry) and Afghanistan.
Sphere: Related [...]
(A paper to be presented at a panel of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, Modern Language Association Annual Convention, 30 December 2009)
As a professor of English appointed to a school of nursing and its Center for Nursing Scholarship, I wear several hats. A writing coach and editor, I support faculty members’ writing goals; [...]
The Times announces that Comcast has purchased NBC Universal from General Electronic (”We Bring Good Things to Life” . . . including parts for nuclear bombs), thus “Reshaping the TV Industry.” Whatever that means.
Before G.E. could sell its controlling stake in the media company, it had to buy out the stake of Vivendi, the French media [...]
One of early twentieth-century America’s literary critiques of capitalism (hard to believe nowadays, isn’t it, that serious authors and readers might critique our economic system), Frank Norris’s The Octopus, has as its ironic tag line, “whatever the traffic will bear.”
The invisible hand of the market, we are told with mind-numbing repetition and diminishing credibility, makes [...]
A prominent entertainment “industry” figure is blackmailed by a man with a film “treatment” that describes the prominent entertainment “industry” figure’s misdeeds.
Robert Joel Halderman’s “Letterman”?
Well, I had in mind Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player, based on the book by Michael Tolkin (who also wrote the screenplay).
Halderman’s derivative plot (and considerably less serious misdeeds than in [...]
Pay no attention to the dismal (and rising) unemployment rate.
Fed chair Ben Bernanke has announced that it is likely that the Great Recession has ended.
And now last Sunday’s New York Times Style Magazine (Men’s Fashion Fall 2009) has confirmed it.
Among the luxuries available to us:
Gotho-Edwardo-Victorian frock coats and top hats.
Sheer fabric shirting.
De luxe dog tags.
A [...]
All of the recent hoopla about the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival in 1969 (if everyone who claimed to have been there were actually there, it would have required the entire state of New York to accommodate them) had me thinking about where I was in the “Summer of Love.” I don’t remember, [...]
As widely reported in the news media, the preeminent scholar of African-American studies, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a public intellectual known to a large American audience for his PBS programs on Africa and on African-American genealogy, was arrested at his home in Cambridge, MA, after he allegedly yelled at police who had come [...]
It has been over twenty years since I visited my mother’s ancestral home (her father was a McVey) in Edinburgh, Scotland, but on my next journey there I will visit Broughton Street Bookshop.
Proprietor Brian Rafferty opened the shop because he was unsuccessful in securing career employment in information technology for which he has the necessary [...]
Two used and antiquarian booksellers in Devonshire deserve attention.
In the village of Moretonhampstead, Roger Collicott Books specializes in used books, antiquarian books and manuscripts related to Devon and Cornwall. It is a tidy, well ordered store with an impressive variety of books given the narrowness of its focus. On my recent visit, the owner was busy [...]
Flying back to the States from two weeks in England, I pass the time reading The Daily Telegraph.
Front-page news: Homes with no garden will hit 2.1m next year. (The number was only 1.6 million in 1995.)
Extensive front-page and inside coverage of the war in Afghanistan (including photos and profiles of recent casualties). The war dead [...]
Here in Oxford for a three-day conference (Making Sense of Health, Illness and Disease) and to present a paper, “AIDS and the Paradigms of Dissent,” I began my visit by attending a concert in Exeter College chapel performed by Charivari Agréable and ended tonight with another concert by the same. The advantage of visiting a musical place (Oxford) in a [...]
Where is one so weak as in a bookstore? — a theme of a blog posting last year. I’m in Oxford presenting a paper at a global health conference at Mansfield College. Arriving a day early (on purpose) I spent the day wandering the streets and browsing in bookstores. Books and Oxford have been closely associated [...]
Like most boys, my second objects of infatuation and attachment (after my parents) were cars.
Growing up in the 1950s and 60s, my friends and I could tell the nuances of styling changes from one year to the next (which baffled my fifth-grade teacher, Miss Keefe), and could even recognize the make of an auto by [...]
It wasn’t enough that the Right wing, generously funded by the Mormon Church, succeeded in passing a constitutional amendment in California ending same-sex marriage. Now Ken Starr, Bill Clinton’s old nemesis, and the Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund have filed legal briefs defending the constitutionality of Prop 8 and seeking to nullify the marriages of [...]
