Version 6.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Linux.

• Jacket Copy links to Sports Illustrated archive, which offers writing from Don Delillo and William Faulkner.  I don’t think either piece is that interesting, but still pretty cool.
• The changing job description of librarians is covered in the New York Times.  I have been thinking about librarians a lot lately as I ponder my future.
• Bernie Sanders, in In These Times, on the failed legacy of Milton Friedman.
• The Guardian of all places has an article about the recent reissues of the classic Indiana hardcore band Zero Boys early work.  They also played a few shows in California last week; word from out there has been overwhelmingly positive about their performance.
• The Atlantic on how the Greeks treated soldiers returning from war.

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Via the excellent On Purpose comes word that the OED is going to be an Internet based dictionary after its third printing:

Biggest development? The third edition of the 20-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary will also be its last! After publication of “the first comprehensive and up-to-date edition of the OED in one alphabetical sequence since the original edition of 1928?, the OED will (figuratively) close all 20 of its covers and move on to a bigger and brighter future as an internet-only text.

A few years ago I linked to a Susan Sontag interview in The Atlantic Monthly where she praised the idea of having the OED on a CD (which is funny considering she bashed electronic literature in a speech before her death). The CD is quickly becoming an archaic, out of date, method for distribution. I am glad the OED realizes this and has begun the transition to publishing on the Internet only. The more accessible it becomes, the better. I only wish a subscription came without such a steep price.

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• Thank you to Dr. Tompkins for passing along this encouraging article from Inside Higher Ed about the current crisis in English jobs.  Some of the ideas discussed in this article are very similar to my own thinking about what my eventual career path may entail.
• Via Jill, I am slowly engrossing myself in danah boyd’s freshly published dissertation about social networks.
• Cory Doctorow on writing in an age of distraction.  More on this from me soon.
• I’ve been thinking about Darwin a lot lately.  Conveniently, The Guardian has an article about a few new books discussing him.
• The new issue of The Atlantic has a number of articles about race in the post Obama election world, with mixed results, but also an excellent interview with Desmond Tutu:

Is there ever a time when a leader shouldn’t sit down and talk with an enemy?

If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies. The apartheid government in South Africa used to say they didn’t talk to terrorists, and they said Madiba [Nelson Mandela] was one of those. But of course, there’s no point in talking to someone else—someone who is not a leader, who has really no constituency—when that “terrorist,” so-called, is almost certainly the person that the oppressed regard as their leader. If you choose to talk with somebody else, the people will say, “That’s a stooge.” Any agreements you have with that one will have no credence.

How does peace come? Peace doesn’t come because allies agree. Allies are allies—they already agree! Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that’s where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency. Then, when you do things that are risky, your people know that you are not likely to do something reckless. If you are doing something that is a bit dodgy, they will give you the benefit of the doubt.

This week’s video is from Black Flag’s very hard (as in, I can’t even find a full copy on the Internet hard to find) “Live 86″ video.   Here they are playing the song In My Head:

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• The Atlantic on the 1958 NFL championship game and the recent book and documentary about it.
• End of year record list from Dead Metaphor.
• Digital Humanities Quarterly on something called Digital Humanities.
• Nick over at Grand Text Auto’s review of Sentences makes it sound like a book worth checking out.

This week’s video is a series of news reports on the punk scene in Boise Idaho circa 1985. Two weird anomalies out of this: I’m pretty surprised that Septic Death is not featured at all. Even stranger is how the reporter seems to be pretty accepting of punk and pretty tolerant/fair about presenting them in a good light. When I was in high school during the nineties I would have to talk down my parents after every news report about punk, hardcore, and especially Straight Edge that made everyone involved seem like a freak or criminal. This report from Boise is pretty refreshing.

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• Cool article from Gamestudies on simulating weather in video games and other virtual environments.
• Two articles on transgendered children: one from The American Prospect and another from The Atlantic.
• Dalkey Archive’s interview with Jean-Phillippe Toussaint.
• Stuart Moulthrop’s Pushing Back: Living & Writing In Broken Spaces.

Our video this week is a great find from Jacket Copy of Vladimir Nabokov being interviewed, righteously dissing Freud,  and reading, in English and Russian, from Lolita.  I can’t get it to embed properly, so click the link!

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• Christy Dena’s insightful response to Jane McGonigal’s essay The Puppet Master Problem: Design For Real World, Mission-Based Gaming from the Second Person anthology.

• Michael Filas review of N. Katherine Hayles’ My Mother Was A Computer: Digital Subjects & Literary Texts.

• Daniel Green reviews the new James Wood book in the new issue of Open Letters Monthly.

Meanwhile…

• The New Yorker piece on Obama’s early years in Chicago politics is another indicator he is just as scummy and slimy as the next politician. Making the right friends, the right votes, the right influences; you might counter by saying “that’s politics” but I say that if you take part in that crap, I blame you. I’d rather have no government than one filled with slimeballs. None of the above…yet again…in 2008.

• Alexander Solzhenitsyn recently passed away. When we moved to Manahawkin, I remember the first friend I made was reading The Gulag Archipelago at the time. We started to bond while discussing that and other books.

• Io9 offers a guide for fans of the modern Doctor Who series who wish to get into the classic series.

• Scott Esposito comments on the amazing ending of The Mill On The Floss and links to a review of the novel from a 1860 issue of The Atlantic.

• PETA still sucks as much as I remember.

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Recently I was reading this interview, from 2000 in The Atlantic, with the late Susan Sontag. Among the things she discusses is technology:

The leap is from writing by hand to the typewriter. From writing with a typewriter to using a computer is no leap at all.” In the same way, the real leap is when books are set in type and they become uniform, reproducible objects. They can then be uniform reproducible objects in some non-paper-based form, and I don’t feel in any way threatened by that. I don’t need the OED in book form. I’m delighted it’s a CD and I can stick it in my computer.

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