Harvard University says it won’t participate in Google Book Search for in-copyright works under the terms of the just-announced legal settlement. Why? It’s all about access. Harvard also says it may change its mind as the settlement evolves. I had a feeling we would be seeing some pushback before long. Who’s next?… Read more...
The global economy’s collapsing, we’re closing in on a historic presidential election, and lord knows what the world’s rogue nuclear states are up to. (Maybe the IAEA does. I do like the idea of an “Atoms for Peace” agency.) Here’s what’s been happening in my world in the last week: On Saturday, I attended an all-day marathon reading of Paradise Lost at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn. (It’s Milton’s 400th anniversary this year.) Sunday I flew back to D.C. and finished up a big story about a new edition of Frankenstein that gives us Mary Shelley’s original draft, or… Read more...
Mark Athitakis, a DC-based critic and arts editor of the Washington City Paper, has put up a page of who’s reading in the area over the next few months. You can find it here at his American Fiction Notes blog. Good work, Mark…. Read more...
I’ve been remiss in not posting my most recent investigation for the Chronicle: “New Ratings of Humanities Journals Do More than Rank—They Rankle.” It looks at an ambitious project in Europe called ERIH, or the European Reference Index for the Humaniities. ERIH assigns journals in the humanities and social sciences to three categories: A, B, or C. The people behind ERIH insist that the categories do not represent grades—in other words, they’re not meant to be judgments on the quality of the various journals, just assessments of how widely read each journal is. A lot of scholars don’t buy that… Read more...
I’m making up for light posting here lately by guest-blogging over at Bookslut this week. Come on over and check it out. Feel free to send literary tidbits my way, too…. Read more...
It’s been a light posting week—sorry. Journalism has been getting in the way. I’ve also expended too much energy fretting over the Nobel Lit prize and recent fighting words from Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, about how backwards American lit is: “There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world … not the United States,” he told the Associated Press. “The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue… Read more...
