December 2008 Archives
December 26, 2008
Posted at 4:12 PM in Academe
Beginning tomorrow, 10,000 literature scholars, more or less, descend on San Francisco for three days to hash out the latest (?) in lit-crit and the dismal job market. I get to cover it for the Chronicle. Wish me luck. If you happen to be there, drop me a note (jhowarddc AT gmail DOT com or jennifer DOT howard AT chronicle DOT com), look for me in the publishers' hall, or grab me (not literally, please) after a panel for a cup of coffee or a drink. News tips and hot rumors welcome.
Posted at 3:31 PM in Publish or Perish
I got to spend some time recently at Georgetown University's Office of Scholarly and Literary Publications. Informally known as Booklab, it's a "literary boutique" run by Carole Fungaroli Sargent, who combines a deep knowledge of publishing with an intuitive-and-informed sense of how writers work and what they need. An author herself, Carole also has a PhD in 18th-century literature. She gets what it means to be a writer and a scholar. She created Booklab to help Georgetown-based authors cope with the rigors of getting ideas into book form and out into the world. (She'll work with non-Georgetown authors too, time permitting.)
Carole can help with the practical side of things--What should a good proposal contain? What does this contract language mean? How do I find a good indexer?--but she really encourages each author to think about the bigger picture: Why this book now? Why am I the best person to write it? What are its ideal "shelfmates"? How does it fit into my larger career? What does it have to say to the world? How can I build a platform for my ideas?
Booklab's funded through the office of Jim O'Donnell, Georgetown's provost, who summed up the prevailing attitude toward tenure and promotion this way: "We'll drop you from the helicopter naked with a Bowie knife in the middle of the wilderness, and if you come back within seven years wearing animal skins and dragging an elk behind you, you get tenure."
Read more about Booklab here.
FYI, Carole maintains an excellent blog about writing and publishing. Bookmark it now.
Posted at 3:13 PM in History Matters
I've been distracted with one thing and another of late (holidays, children, writing projects), so I'm behind on posting. Sorry about that. Meanwhile, I had the pleasure last week of writing about a historical hoax perpetrated by a bunch of students in a history class at George Mason University. They created a fictional 19th-century pirate named Edward Owens and turned him loose on the Internet, along with a made-up undergraduate namd Jane Browning who was supposedly tracking down the Owens legend.
The catch? Their professor, T. Mills Kelly, told them to do it. It's a study in ethics, in research skills, and in learning to tell a sound source from a suspect one. Read more in my story and at Mills's blog, edwired. Reax from American Historical Association staffers here (scroll down a bit). Also see Edward Owens's Wikipedia entry and Jane Browning's YouTube videos. You have been warned.
Note: The Wikipedia entry is marked as being considered for deletion, which suggests that someone in Wikipedialand wasn't too happy about being hoaxed. I've seen some blogospheric debate about whether the class took unfair advantage of so-called trust networks to disseminate the hoax. That's an interesting debate right there.
December 17, 2008
Posted at 3:29 PM in Lit Crit
I have read exactly one thing by Roberto Bolano so far, and that's the short story in the Dec. 22 issue of The New Yorker. I should probably tackle The Savage Detectives or 2666, but I don't think I can bear to until Bolano fever dies down a little. Meanwhile, scholars have joined litbloggers in the Bolano boom. From an essay (subscription only) by Ilan Stavans in the Dec. 19 Chronicle Review:
Witnessing Bolaño's canonization in academe has been fascinating. Barely a few years ago, he was a don nadie, a supreme nobody; now The New Yorker puts its imprimatur on him with a review, he's a household name at symposia, and he's taught as a refreshing perspective, a kind of Jack Kerouac for the new millennium.
Alas, Bolaño's work is rapidly becoming a factory for scholarly platitudes. More than a year ago, I had a student who wrote his senior thesis on the author. My student started early in his junior year with a handful of resources at his disposal. By the time he had finished, the plethora of tenure-granting studies was dumbfounding: Bolaño and illness, Bolaño and the whodunit, Bolaño and the beatniks, Bolaño and eschatology, etc. Since then, interviews, photographs, e-mail messages — everything by or about him — are perceived as discoveries (even though most of the material was never lost to a Spanish-language audience).
December 12, 2008
Posted at 2:21 PM in Archives
Over at the Chronicle's Wired Campus blog, I've posted a Q&A with Ed Folsom, co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive. This is the first in an occasional series of chats with folks at digital archives about where they've been and where they're headed. I'm doing it as a way to sneak in a little more digital-humanities coverage. Plus it's fun. If you have a favorite digital archive--or if you run one--let me know about it.
December 10, 2008
Posted at 1:53 PM in Ink-Stained Wretches
From the NY Observer:
The Washington Post's publisher Katharine Weymouth sent out an email to her staff this morning declaring that the business model for the paper would have to undergo a "fundamental change." First, they're going hyper-local! Washingtonpost.com is going to be recast itself as a local news and information site for people who live in or near the Beltway.
From Weymouth's memo, as reported by the NYO
The three pillars of our strategy are:
--Being about Washington, for Washingtonians, and those affected by it
--Providing utility, engagement, and convenience for our local readers
--Extending our brand with new products and new platforms
My first reaction? I live in Washington, and I want my local paper to do more than just give me the local news. Nothing against "utility, engagement, and convenience," but I wonder what this kind of journalistic locavorism will do to the Post, one of the few major U.S. papers still standing. Is going local the only way papers (not necessarily in print form) will survive?
December 9, 2008
Posted at 11:42 PM in The Classics
I couldn't let today end without wishing John Milton a happy quatercentenary. The Guardian has a nice birthday roundup, including a Miltoniana quiz , some musings on Milton v. Shakespeare in the greatest-poet contest (do we really have to choose?), and Philip Pulllman reading a bit o' Paradise Lost.
December 4, 2008
Posted at 9:01 AM in Capital City
To rent or not to rent your house out for the inauguration: That's been a hot topic among capital residents the last few weeks. It's been all over my neighborhood listservs, and yesterday, at the Foggy Bottom Metro stop, guys with big signs were shilling for inauguralhomes.com, a website where Washingtonians can post their properties and out-of-towners can trawl for a place to stay. Craigslist is hopping with inaugural offers too, or so I hear.
Is the Howard household going to clear out for the inauguration and make a quick buck off our Capitol Hill rowhouse? It's only a mile and a half from the Capitol--two Metro stops, a 20-minute walk--so there might be some takers.
The land-grab mentality makes me nervous, though, and it might be worth more to me in the long run to stick around and catch a piece of history. I trawled some of the listings on inauguralhomes.com last night, just to see what my fellow citizens think they can get for their manses, and was appalled by some of the numbers. Three thousand dollars a day for a house, even a nice one in Northwest? Fifteen hundred for a one-bedroom condo downtown? Come on. Some of these properties are miles away from any of the action.
Washingtonians: Don't let greed get the better of you. This should be a chance to open the city to our fellow citizens, not make a killing off them. (Nothing wrong with a healthy profit, of course.)
Non-residents: If you're coming to town for the big day--and I hope you are--and you want to rent a place, make sure you know what you're getting for your money. Look hard at a DC map. Talk to somebody local if you can. Not all neighborhoods are equal--and very few are worth 3000 smackeroos a day.
Still, if you want to make me an offer....
December 2, 2008
Posted at 12:04 PM in Flora & Fauna
What's happened to all the acorns? The D.C. area, famous for its trees, is usually full of nuts this time of year (no jokes about Congress, please). Not this fall, the WaPo reports:
The idea seemed too crazy to Rod Simmons, a measured, careful field botanist. Naturalists in Arlington County couldn't find any acorns. None. No hickory nuts, either. Then he went out to look for himself. He came up with nothing. Nothing crunched underfoot. Nothing hit him on the head.
Then calls started coming in about crazy squirrels. Starving, skinny squirrels eating garbage, inhaling bird feed, greedily demolishing pumpkins. Squirrels boldly scampering into the road. And a lot more calls about squirrel roadkill.
..."I'm used to seeing so many acorns around and out in the field, it's something I just didn't believe," he said. "But this is not just not a good year for oaks. It's a zero year. There's zero production. I've never seen anything like this before."
Don't tell Jumpy and Jumpy Squirrel, who live in our backyard and are getting fat off stale bread and birdseed.
