I’ll be at the MLA this year – will I see you there? – delivering a paper that is basically a major rewrite of my inaugural Valve post about the crisis in humanities publishing. (Other bloggers you know are on the same panel.) Here’s a bit from the old post: [click to continue…]
On Wednesday evening, a Breaking News session on RTBF, the French-speaking Belgian public television announced that the Flemish (Dutch-speaking) parliament of Belgium had unilaterally announced their independence. It wasn’t true, of course, otherwise I would have written about it Wednesday night (wondering whether my Belgian passport would still be worth anything, and whether the Flemish independence would lead to a solution for my conflict with the Belgian State ). The newsbulletin, of which (very poor) versions can be seen on YouTube (here, here, and here ), looked realistic enough to understand that many Belgians believed it. From what I gather from the Belgian media, it caused a wave of consternation, and even some panic, throughout Belgium.