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November 18, 2008

Milton Out Loud

Scenes from a marathon: My story about St. Olaf College's all-day reading of Paradise Lost is now up:

In between his reading stints, Chad Goodroad, a senior majoring in English and political science, hawked black "Milton Marathon" T-shirts at a card table. Someone asked him how sales were. "Crazy," he said. "Actually, kinda slow." A student in one of the shirts knitted her way through Book III. A professor's toddlers played nearby on a harvest display of pumpkins and sheaves.

...Participants fortified themselves with coffee and Subway sandwiches. Another English professor contributed a devil's-food cake and a pair of devil's horns. Somebody drew a picture of the archangel Michael on the chalkboard.

"It's cool," Mr. Goodroad observed midafternoon, when the group had made it to Book VI. "It's kind of like a purging."

Miraculously, nobody's energy flagged. It wasn't just the coffee and sandwiches; read out loud, Milton's blank verse can be propulsive, and the readers had caught the rhythm.

Posted at 01:06 PM in The Classics | | Comments (0)

November 17, 2008

Stop Smiling, D.C.

The Chicago-based mag Stop Smiling has just put out a D.C. issue. I went to a party on Friday for some of the contributors and people Q&A'd in the issue (I'm neither) and got off to a good start by asking the editor who he was. At least I can't be accused of sucking up.

Anyway, it's a good-looking issue that's deliberately (I think/hope) all over the place: an analysis of presidential handwriting, a tribute to the Florida Avenue Grill, a cri de coeur about the plight of the Chesapeake Bay, a nifty look at campaign ephemera (buttons, posters, an elephant flyswatter allegedly from the 1964 Democratic convention) written by two Smithsonian curators who have spent 20 years collecting the stuff for the National Museum of American History. I talked with one of them--William L. Bird Jr.--at the party and was reminded that it's usually more fun to talk to historians than to other journos.

Profiles and interviews are the main engine of the D.C. issue, which is either a good or a bad thing depending on your appetite for profiles. Mine's limited, but I found some good stuff here as well as some head-scratchers and all-too-predictable choices. (Another profile of Christopher Buckley? I'm still regretting the time I wasted on that NYT piece about him a few weeks back.) Better bets, IMHO, include the pieces on George Pelecanos, actor and musician Big G a k a Anwan Glover, soon-to-be-ex-NEA chairman Dana Gioia, Chemical Brother Joe Reese, Frank Rich Sr., father of the NYT columnist and the last owner of Rich's Shoes, a D.C. landmark back in the day, and Ilir Zherka of DC Vote, a group dedicated to getting us capital denizens fully enfranchised at long last. (If only. Mr. Obama, are you listening?)

Here's Anwan Glover on why the homegrown go-go sound didn't catch on more outside the city:

It was so selfish here. We could have caught on. I hate to say it, but DC is a selfish city. We just try to keep so much stuff to ourselves. Really, there are a lot of haters. Crabs in a barrel. But the music is good. I performed with everybody, from Scarface to Onyx, Biggie, Pac, Busta Rhymes. Man,we done did it with everybody, and they loved the sound.

Spread the D.C. love.

Posted at 08:21 AM in Capital City | | Comments (0)

November 13, 2008

His Dark Materials

In case it's not already on your calendar, Dec. 9 is Milton's 400th birthday. A couple of weeks ago I flew out to St. Olaf College, Minn. to take part in a marathon reading of "Paradise Lost" that some folks there staged in honor of the quatercentenary. I write about it in next week's Chronicle.

If you ever have a chance to read Paradise Lost out loud, I urge you to take it. It's more fun than you think. Among the joys? When you check back in with a classic like PL, you stumble on phrases that have taken on lives of their own outside the source material. Take this bit from Book II, which Philip Pullman mined for the trilogy "His Dark Materials":

...Into this wild abyss,
The womb of nature and perhaps her grave,
Of neither sea, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless the almighty maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds,
Into this abyss the wary fiend
Stood on the brink of hell and looked a while,
Pondering his voyage...

Early this year, the Oxford University Press blog ran some of Pullman's thoughts on "Milton in 2008." (Pullman also wrote an introduction for a recent Oxford edition of PL.)

The quartercentenary fun is just beginning. The University of Cambridge, Milton's alma mater, has all kinds of festivities planned, and my sources at St. Olaf's tell me that there are dozens of PL marathons taking place this fall. Find one near you--or stage your own and make yourself popular with all your friends.

Posted at 12:19 PM in The Classics | | Comments (2)

November 12, 2008

If You Have a Lit Prize to Announce...

Tell the winner before you send out the media alert. An editor friend of mine got this note on Monday:

New York-based writer Nam Le was tonight (10.11.08) named the winner of this year’s £60,000 Dylan Thomas Prize for his debut collection of short stories, The Boat....

Nam Le will NOT be aware that he has won until 9.15pm BMT this evening (10.11.08), therefore, he will not be available for interview until after this time.

I guess not.

Posted at 04:04 PM in Spoils and Accolades | | Comments (0)

Operation Paperback

Founded in 1999, Operation Paperback collects gently used books and sends them to American troops deployed overseas.

Many of our troops are serving far from home and living in facilities that provide few of the comforts of home. At the end of the duty day, the opportunity to escape into a good book is welcomed.

I can only imagine. Whatever you think of the war(s), this seems like a damn good idea. (Via.)

Posted at 02:04 PM in Reading and Writing | | Comments (0)

November 11, 2008

What He Said

RIP John Leonard. Lots of appreciations elsewhere to which I have nothing useful to add, except to direct you to this Nation essay from 2000, which ought to be read by all working critics and reporters and the people who edit them:

I like to think of myself as having published in the New York Review, The New Statesman, the Yale Review and Tikkun. But there was also TV Guide.

This sounds less careerist than sluttish. It is, however, a sluttishness probably to be expected of someone who had to make a living after he discovered that the novels he reviewed were a lot better than the novels he wrote. We may belong to what the poet Paul Valéry called "the delirious professions"--by which Valéry meant "all those trades whose main tool is one's opinion of one's self, and whose raw material is the opinion others have of you"--but reporters, critics and "cultural journalists," no less than publicists, are caged birds in a corporate canary-cage. Looking back, I see what I required of my employers was that they cherish my every word and leave me alone. If I understand what Warren Beatty was trying to tell us in the movie Reds, it is that John Reed only soured on the Russian Revolution after they fucked with his copy.

Exactly.

Posted at 02:28 PM in Lit Crit | | Comments (0)

November 10, 2008

Scholars Behaving Digitally

One of the more intriguing things about the scholarly-communication beat--my official bailiwick at the Chronicle--is the ethnographic component. In other words, schol comm covers not just what scholars communicate (i.e., research) but how they communicate, and to whom. Why does one researcher go for an online-only journal while another is bound to print? How do blogs and listservs figure in? What new genres are cropping up, and who's exploring and exploiting them? It can be a fascinating blend of old and new scholarly folkways.

I hesitate to inflict another report on you, but the Association of Research Libraries released a pretty interesting one today-- "Current Models of Digital Scholarship"--which explores some of the "largely unexplored ecosystem" of scholarly behavior in the digital arena. From my Chronicle coverage:

The report details some intriguing disciplinary differences and adaptations. Humanists rely more than their colleagues in the social sciences and sciences on e-mail lists and discussion forums. Social scientists lean on professional and scholarly hubs, and on preprint resources like the Social Sciences Research Network. Sites that speed access to and publication of data matter most to researchers in science, technology, and medicine.

The lines between genres have blurred, too. "We observed 'video articles,' peer-reviewed reader commentary, and medieval illuminated texts coded as data—all evidence of the creative mash-ups that challenge us to rethink the definitions of traditional content categories," the report notes.

Posted at 12:05 PM in Academe | | Comments (0)

November 07, 2008

Not Your Usual Book Club

The London incarnation of the Institute for the Future of the Book, or if:book as it likes to be known, is hosting a virtual group read of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. Seven female critics and creative writers will read the novel, jot down notes in the virtual margins, and discuss it all in a group blog. Other readers will be able to read the novel online and weigh in via a public forum on the site.

I did a quick take on the project for the Chronicle's Wired Campus blog. This bit from Bob Stein, if:book's co-director, is what really caught my eye:

Fundamentally this is an experiment in how the web might be used as a space for collaborative close-reading. We don’t yet understand how to model a complex conversation in the web’s two-dimensional environment and we’re hoping this experiment will help us learn some of what we need to do to make this sort of collaboration as successful as possible.

Posted at 10:04 AM in Net Life | | Comments (0)

November 06, 2008

Pity the Lemming

...already unfairly maligned as suicidal, and now hit hard by climate change. The BBC reports on a new study that finds wetter winters in southern Norway, "a bleak prospect for the region's lemmings." Scientists think that the snow is no longer stable enough to provide the animals with winter shelter.

And the suicide myth?

Rather than hibernating, lemmings spend the winter living in the space between the ground and a stable layer of snow above. Dry winters would allow large numbers to survive until spring, resulting in a population explosion. On occasions, there were so many that snowploughs were deployed to clear squashed animals from roads. These years often saw Norwegian lemmings (Lemmus lemmus) having to compete hard for food. The desperate search led some to jump off high ground into water, leading to the popular - but wrong - assumption that they were prone to commit collective suicide.

Disney didn't help the cause either when, back in 1958, it forced a number of hapless lemmings off a cliff in order to get footage for the so-called documentary "White Wilderness."

I wil think twice before I use another lemming metaphor, not that I often do.

Posted at 04:12 PM in Flora & Fauna | | Comments (0)

More Frankenstein

Now that the election is safely behind us...

Arts & Letters Daily linked to my Frankenstein story yesterday. Please take a look if you're in a textual-scholarship mood. The TLS also has a review up of Charles Robinson's new edition; their take focuses more on the novel's back story (cold, rainy summer on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lord Byron's challenge to the party to come up with ghost stories, etc.) and on its reception history.

Posted at 08:13 AM in Spoils and Accolades | | Comments (2)