Read some new fiction of mine in The Collagist, an excellent new online mag from Dzanc Books.
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?
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 probably as close to it as we're going to get. Yesterday I wrote up the news that Google has reached a settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, who had sued the company--sorry, I think "Internet behemoth" is the phrase du jour--over its Book Search program.
I'll post more about Milton and Frankenstein later. The Dow may plummet, but scholarship moves on.
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.
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 argument. (Neither, I've now learned, does the British Academy. At least it didn't in 2006. Scroll down to section 6.5 here.)
As I describe in the story, some journal editors have launched a revolt, and American scholars have begun to realize that this isn't just a European phenomenon. Many U.S.-based journals are already listed in ERIH's rankings, and there's no guarantee we won't see a homegrown equivalent of ERIH one of these days.
What's fascinating to me isn't the journal rankings per se but how they're part of a global push to measure humanistic scholarship the way scientific research is judged--by citation indexes and other metrics. Australia, for instance, has undertaken a massive review of research across the disciplines called ERA, or the Excellence for Research in Australia Initiative.
The takeaway: Humanists are alarmed by this trend, and they have reason to be.
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.
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 of literature ...That ignorance is restraining."
Well, he's entitled to his opinion, ignorant and insular as it may be. What really got my goat was how seriously American lierary folk took his comments. He stuck a knife--a small one, maybe, but sharp enough to sting--right into the heart of American insecurity, which runs as deep in this culture as our sense of exceptionalism does. Our culturati still, after 232 years, have a tendency to look over their shoulders at Europe.
Without sounding like an arrogant and provincial American, I have to ask: Why do we care what some dude in Sweden thinks? Writers write what they write, and ours are no exception. Sometimes it's regional, sometimes it's universal. The two are hardly incompatible.
Oh, and why is it okay, in 2008, to claim that Europe is the center of the literary world? Does the literary world even have a center? Should it? Does handing out a million-dollar prize buy you the right to decide? I don't think so.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is no doubt a very lovely thing for the winning authors and their publishers. But if Americans won it every other year, it still wouldn't mean a damn thing, really.
Len Downie, the Post's former executive editor, says enough already with the DC-bashing:
Large numbers of Washingtonians have dedicated much of their lives to real public service that does not involve the ego trips, trappings and hypocrisies of elective office.
Amen to that. It's not all earmarks and Gucci Gulch lobbyists, kids.
For all its partisanship and jockeying for power and influence, Washington's culture--with roots in the New Deal, World War II, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Reagan Revolution--is receptive to new ideas and new people. It is steadily refreshed by idealistic young professionals who come here to work and learn for low wages in the backrooms of power. And it readily assimilates waves of older hands who arrive with each new administration and member of Congress, and then stay in the public arena here.
And did we mention it's also a nice place to live?
As much as it has changed, Washington remains a pleasantly unique city, with its low skyline, monumental architecture, preserved history and green open spaces. Despite the serious dedication to work of so many of its residents, their lifestyle is generally unpretentious..
Damn straight, Len. Thanks for saying so.
D.C.'s much-loved local indie book-and-music chain has closed. Forlorn customers are leaving testimonials here. The WaPo's Bob Thompson wrote a nice obit yesterday.
For heaven's sake, people, if you have a local bookstore you're fond of, get over there and buy a book today.
