March 2008 Archives
March 31, 2008
Posted at 1:18 PM in Anglophilia
"Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World," said the Rat. "And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all. Don't ever refer to it again, please. Now then! Here's our backwater at last, where we're going to lunch." (Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows)
The British have decided it's time to stop messing about (in boats or anywhere else) and give Ratty the water vole some serious legal protection. Not a minute too soon, the Guardian reports:
Water voles are one of the fastest declining of Britain's mammal species and populations are believed to have crashed nearly 90% in the last 20 years. American minks have wiped them out as they spread up rivers, ditches and dykes, pest controllers have used poison indiscriminately against them and many have not survived attempts to relocate them.
Enjoy your backwater in peace, Ratty.
March 26, 2008
Posted at 3:43 PM in Lost in the Stacks
The Library of Congress wants to turn its European Reading Room into display space for an exhibit in honor of Abraham Lincoln. (2009 is his bicentennial.) Scholars do not think this is a good idea. Not only do they like the space--and it really is a knockout--they like the multilingual research support they get there. Does the proposed move mean that the Library now cares more about tourism than it does about research? Read more here (subscription required) and here.
March 24, 2008
Posted at 7:48 PM in Publish or Perish
Literary Rejections on Display ("Join the Revolution, Join the Pity Party"): Sanctioned by Entertainment Weekly, and sure to make you smile. Through gritted teeth.
Remember this: Someone out there will always say no.
Can you tell I got a rejection today? One of the better, more thoughtful ones--much to admire, etc. etc.--which only makes it worse.
Posted at 4:37 PM in Lit Crit
Did Coleridge translate Goethe's Faust? Two Romanticists say yes. Others say no. Passionate debate ensues. I've written about the devilish kerfluffle here. As one of my sources told me, "Coleridgeans are not known for their unanimity."
March 18, 2008
Posted at 2:45 PM in Publish or Perish
And, as the Chronicle reports today (subscription required), the students have won:
The University of Iowa has backtracked on a plan to post all graduate students' theses online and make them freely available to the public. The reversal came in response to vigorous protests last week from students in the university's prestigious graduate program in writing, who said that the plan could threaten the commercial value of their novels, plays, and other creative works.
Reax here and here (see the comments) and here.
March 13, 2008
Posted at 9:39 PM in Publish or Perish
My friend Jim Hynes, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, tipped me off yesterday that students there are up in arms about a new university policy that requires them to make their dissertations available open access--as in free--in order to graduate. We're talking fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction here, not scholarly work. The students, understandably, are worried that this may scotch their chances of getting publishing contracts for their work.
My Chron colleague Andrea Foster had an excellent story today about it (subscription required). Open-access guru Peter Suber responds on his blog here:
I defend OA for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) and even argue that universities should mandate OA for ETDs. On the other hand, my arguments focus on non-fiction works of scholarship in the sciences and humanities. I've never thought about OA for works of fiction and creative writing submitted for degree requirements in an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program like the Iowa Writer's Workshop. I suspect that many universities with OA policies for ETDs haven't either.
Barbara Fister of the Association of College & Research Libraries weighs in on what she calls the "Free Culture Clash" here. At Sivacracy, Siva Vaidhyanathan takes it further with a humdinger of a headline: "U. of Iowa Stealing Student Work and Forcing Googlization." For some writers' takes, see Megan Pillow's reaction at the Huffington Post (yes, the HuffPo) and Jim's here and here.
Where does this leave writers who can't even give their stuff away?
March 4, 2008
Posted at 9:14 PM in Gender Benders
The blogosphere's been afire for the last day or so with reactions to an op-ed by Charlotte Allen that ran in the Washington Post, my hometown paper and former employer, this past Sunday. The headline and subhed pretty much sum it up: "Women v. Women: We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?" Among the highlights: Allen suggests that we ladies make worse drivers, mathematicians, and philosophers because our brains are smaller than men's.
Yeah. Anyway, I've posted about some academic-blog reaction over at the Chronicle's blog Footnoted, including a nifty scientific takedown of Allen's so-called evidence by Jake Young, an MD/PhD candidate at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. In a post on his blog Pure Pedantry ("WaPo Spouts Some Hooey About Sex Differences"), Young marshalls evidence of his own from the annals of neuroscience, psychiatry, and mathematics, then tells Allen to take her "data" and shelve it:
It is corrosive to the public's understanding of fact to have demonstrable falsehoods repackaged as a genuine scientific discussion. If Ms. Allen would like to have a discussion on the intellectual level of The View so be it, but don't try and cite data while you do it.
Meanwhlie, over at Bookslut, Jessa Crispin responds to the Post's tepid assertion that Allen's piece was "tongue-in-cheek":
Dear Washington Post: If you want people to understand that your bullshit is "tongue-in-cheek," you should not hire a woman who has written widely as an anti-feminist. Also, you might want to check with the author to make sure she was being tongue-in-cheek. xoxo, J.
