Scott

Last night I mentioned to my wife — a reference librarian at the Library of Congress whose areas of concentration include e-commerce and information technology — that the BBC website had just run a story headlined “Blogging ‘set to peak next year.”” Here it is.

Her response to this was a sound (one I cannot quite transcribe) conveying a subtle blend of disbelief, disgust, and world-weariness. It was not at all a matter of pro-blog parti pris; rather, it reflected a deeply informed disdain for the methods and presumptions usually involved in making such predictions. As usual, I payed close attention to her opinion in the matter. (Reference librarians have amazing powers.)
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My old friend John Palattella is taking over as poetry editor at The Nation. The news brings to mind an image of him surrounded (menaced, even) by large sacks full of envelopes containing manuscripts that are very earnest indeed. The announcement from the editors notes that, as critic, John has shown “sensitivity to form, historical erudition, and a refusal of the provincial dogmas that so often balkanize the small world of poetry.” Quite right, and it will be interesting to see how he translates personal sensibility into editorial policy.

The fact that I am mentioning this has nothing at all to do with the considerable progress this past year on Nikolai!, my epic about Bukharin, composed entirely in limericks.

In November, voters in Ohio passed Issue 5, which more or less prohibits smoking in public places. There are exceptions, but not many; they are spelled out without much wiggle room. A friend who teaches in a small city there tells me it’s a relief to be able to go out for dinner now in a restaurant that doesn’t smell like old ashtrays. But he also had to write a letter to a local newspaper complaining about the editorializing in their coverage of Issue 5. The headline for a news article read something like “Freedom Abolished in Ohio.”

Well, it turns out that was just the tip of one great big iceberg of crazy. In a letter to the Toledo Blade appearing on Sunday, one John T. Kleeberger, of Metamora, identifies “the ominous parallels” (to use what I believe may be the term of art for such exercises).
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What synchronicity: In an entry posted yesterday at Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, Caleb Crain writes about getting some offprints of his article from the latest issue of American Literary History:

I don’t think the world outside academia knows what offprints are any more, if they ever did. I say this with some confidence because when I gave one to a very worldly and well-read acquaintance, he asked, a few weeks after reading it, what it was. Had I had my essay privately printed? he asked. And that was more than a decade ago. I would like to assure everyone that not even I am so nineteenth-century as to have my essays privately printed.

Offprints are unbound printed pages of an article, which a scholarly journal provides to the article’s author so that he may share them with colleagues. The protocol is — or rather, was — that when a researcher wanted to read an article that happened to appear in a journal he didn’t subscribe to, he would send a postcard to the author, care of his institutional address, asking for an offprint. And the author, as a matter of scholarly courtesy, would mail it to him free. My father is a scientist, and when I was little and collected stamps, most of them came from the postcards sent to him and the other scientists at his institution, requesting offprints. In those days, the 1970s and 1980s, the requests by and large came from developing countries, where the research institutions had less money for their libraries. The postcards came from all over the world, in other words, from countries I’d never heard of and imagined I would never see, and it gave me a thrill to see them, emblems of the glamour and global reach of the life of the mind.

Caleb includes an image of the first such postcard he ever received after publishing an article, and offers to send an offprint of his new article if you ask for one in the traditional manner. He mentions “a slight advantage to the paper copy, actually; I couldn’t get online rights for one of the images, so that picture doesn’t appear in JSTOR, only in the printed version.”

A long article in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed covers the findings and recommendations in the MLA’s final report on tenure. Much of the same material is covered by The Chronicle of Higher Education here, I’d guess, but who knows? Short of selling blood — and quite a lot of it — I cannot afford to read anything they publish.
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That sure didn’t take long….Word of Scott Eric Kaufman’s meme experiment has reached Wired News, which just ran a story on it. Well, sort of a story. It manages to avoid discussing what Kaufman was actually trying to do. Seems like the kind of factual point you’d want to nail down.
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An experiment is underway over at Acephalous to test the velocity at which a meme spreads across the blogal landscape. As Scott Eric Kaufman explains the hypothesis being tested:

Most memes, I’d wager, are only superficially organic: beginning small, they acquire minor prominence among low-traffic blogs before being picked up by a high-traffic one, from which many more low-traffic blogs snatch them. Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping, I believe most memes are — to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett’s rebuttal of punctuated equilibrium — “skyhooked” into prominence by high-traffic blogs.

I’m not sure where CT fits in this particular schema, though probably we are of the middling sort. Anyway, please check out the rest of SEK’s entry. Here’s that link again.

And if you have a blog — be its traffic high or low — please consider joining the experiment with just the short of (otherwise content-free) entry you are now reading.

Remember, it’s all for Science, albeit of the MLA variety.

Off the top of my head, I can recall at least one passage each in which Derrida and Foucault say, more or less: “Okay, yes, it would be good to stop talking about Hegel, finally. It’s been a long time since we all agreed that dialectics was a dead end, in fact it seems like we’ve been at this point forever. But there I go, talking about Hegel again. Because he makes us do it, somehow. Damnit, this is really getting old.”

It sounds more impressive when they get that Ecole Normale Supérieure rhythm going, but that’s the rap, in paraphrase. It’s as if the first half of the twentieth century were spent rediscovering Hegel, and the second half trying to forget him.

All of this as prologue to what Adam Kotsko thinks is the present and future “Can we just shut up about this guy?” dynamic:

In fact, although it’s early yet, I will venture a prediction — the 21st century will have been little more than the century of Heidegger fatigue. There will be no great figure who arises to take his place. The recent half-hearted rise of Badiou is little more than a symptom of Heidegger fatigue, and — more to the point — Badiou’s own monumental arrogance can never be anything more than a feeble parody of Heidegger’s. Long after Being and Event has been forgotten (ca. 2009), we’ll all still be doing our painfully close readings of Being and Time, even though we hate it, even though we’ve forgotten why.

Is this sort of thing limited to people doing Continental philosophy and/or “capital-T to show we’re dead serious” Theory? Are there figures in poli sci or sociology — or elsewhere for that matter — who keep monopolizing the conversation for decades after their death?

If someone hinted two years ago that one day I would be eagerly awaiting the third season of a remake of Battlestar Galactica, my response would have been something like, “Get away from me, crazy person, because that is crazy, what you are saying to me.”

The original series ran in the late 1970s and was very, very dumb. Sure, it’s interesting to learn that bits of Mormon theology were embedded into the show. And I suppose some people will now be entertained by those vintage haircuts. But don’t be fooled by the sickly glow of nostalgia. The show was junk. Let’s put it this way: There was a robotic dog.
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The term “wingnut” gets thrown about rather loosely at times. But the life and work of former Representative Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho) embodied all the richness and flavor that expression ought properly to convey. She died yesterday while bravely defying the nanny-state’s intrusive expectation that its charges wear seat belts.

Some highlights of her career are covered over at The Phil Nugent Experience:

Other Republicans had played footsie with the Turner Diaries crowd, but Chenoweth boldly remained attached to them even after the Oklahoma City bombing, an event that inspired her to the optimistic explanation, “Maybe now more people will listen!” Chenoweth married her admiration and concern for the militia groups with her other big obsession, the unspeakable horrors of eco-fascism. Having denounced environmentalism as a deranging form of religion that was at odds with the separation of church and state, she claimed that the government was using its secret black helicopters to terrorize hunters and protect endangered species…. She also, naturally, called for the impeachment of that awful Bill Clinton, but publically declared her support for her kind of world leader, Slobodan Milosovic.

Chenoweth was not simply another opportunist signing onto the “Contract with America” in 1994. “She was,” as Nugent puts it, “a 100% true believer, too radical to ever really accomplish anything and so sincere that you always knew just where you stood with her.”

I interviewed Michael Bérubé by phone over the weekend for a podcast now available from Inside Higher Ed. As you might expect, Bérubé is well-spoken. Alas, the gremlins were just as efficient in doing their work, for there is a certain amount of hiss from the phone line. Here’s hoping some people will try to listen past it. My colleague Elia Powers made heroic efforts to remove the noise. I’m told that this made Bérubé sound like a robot. Which, come to think of it, might have been pretty cool: A case can be made for doing all interviews with a Vocoder, à la Laurie Anderson.

As it is, though, we did get in a little bit of “Long Black Veil” as covered in 1985 by Baby Opaque, with Bérubé on drums and Ian MacKaye (in transit between Minor Threat and Fugazi) on vocals. For the full recording, go here.

Word is that suspects are being rounded up for an online symposium on What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? later in the semester. It’s understandable that the book should get the lion’s share of attention. It’s from a trade press. But the other one, Rhetorical Occasions, from the University of North Carolina Press, will be a lot more interesting to many CT readers.

You would be able to see why, had the good folks at UNCP provided the table of contents, instead of this.

A couple of days ago, in passing, I referred to the president of the United States at our Dear Leader. This has caused some hyperventillation. Just to clarify: The idea that the US and North Korea are in any way similar in polity or social structure never crossed my mind.

That sort of thing is, rather, a right-wing specialty: Gibberish about “totalitarian political correctness” of the Democratic Leadership Committee, etc. is a convenient way for crazy people to signal one another, so they can meet to discuss their shared feelings of persecution.

No, my intended parallel was between the men, not the regimes.

At that level, the element of sarcastic excess, while open to misinterpretation, came pretty close to bordering on the obvious: In each case, a personally unaccomplished and otherwise altogether unimpressive son, guided by his father’s old retainers, makes his country look both terrifying and ridiculous to the rest of the world.

Hysterics love hyperbole. But not all hyperbole is hysteria.

Some weeks ago, watching our Dear Leader answer questions on television, I was overcome with a wave of pity. Not for the president, but for those poor souls, many as yet unborn, who will one day specialize in studying his administration.

Can you imagine having to read countless transcripts of George W. Bush’s speeches? Let alone being obliged to posit them as meaningful? And yet, in the fullness of time, it must come to pass.

Then again, maybe not.
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Watching established news organizations set up homesteads in the blogosphere is a pastime of great interest to me, both as a professional writer and an amateur social psychologist. Few phenomena better illustrate the role that anxiety plays in the life of large institutions.

In some few cases, the internal culture of a magazine or newspaper will encourage (or at least tolerate) a degree of initiative on the part of the writing staff. But most places are just too inflexible for that. And it shows, at all levels.

The habits fostered by an entrenched bureaucracy combine with hazy notions of “our audience” (often treated with an overblown deference finally indistinguishable from condescension) to yield a rigidity embodying pure terror. There is a clutching at reliable formulas, and a deep fear of the interesting, let alone the unusual. A compulsive avoidance of experimentation sometimes alternates (in an almost cyclothymic way) with joylessly frantic, top-down efforts at renewal.

“Be spontaneous!” comes the directive from on high. “Just not too spontaneous!”

And you see the spastic consequence in the blogs, which should probably be called Unclear on the Concept or Lipstick on the Corpse or Watching Grandma Dance the Frug.
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