My GWU law school colleague Dan Solove has persuaded Yale University Press to let him put his new book, _The Future of Reputation_ “online under a non-commercial CC license”:http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/02/the_future_of_r_3.html. Good stuff: I hope to be reviewing the book here at CT one of these days soon as well as John McGowan’s _ American Liberalism: An Interpretation for Our Time_ (which I am half way through – it’s very good) and a fantasy blockbuster that Matt Lister has sent me, but tenure stuff has seriously cut into my writing-longish-essays time (normal service will be resumed shortly).
This is rather odd.
Pepin books has a forthcoming title, Encyclopedia of Ornament
But, as I am very prepared to notice, that cover is just plate 17 of Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, with the title on top. I wonder whether this is some sort of joke. Maybe, since the book isn’t out until June, they decided to have some fun, putting a dummy graphic up. It is pretty funny to have a bunch of ornamental-looking things, none of which are actually ornaments, most of which are carnivorous colony life-forms.
Belle, “at her and John’s other place”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2008/02/nasty.html, describes the argument of a quite startlingly horrendous post at NRO’s _The Corner._
The truly beautiful thing about this is that it incoherently wavers between two poles of repulsive slander: is it Communist Negroes having sex with our white women? Or are Communist Jewesses subverting black Americans who, patriotic though modestly ill-treated, would have been able to resist had the party not offered them the tempting fruits of miscegenation?
Unfortunately, I imagine that this is only the start …