Blue. Different.

So there's this new Blogger version I just signed up for that lets me move page elements around without having to go into HTML.

The upside is that I can now easily put a picture, text, a feed from another site, or other things on the righthand side of the blog (more webliterate people might find this basic, but I'm happy). So if you have a pic you think deserves right-hand-column status, send it to me - otherwise we're stuck with Sacvan Bercovitch, so act quickly. We can also start using labels for each post, like tags on flickr, which would be really fun to do. I also like the collapsible archive listings.

The downside is I can't figure out how to make the thing list our aggregate names as it did before - instead it wanted to list only my name, which I didn't like, so I just took it off and now we're authorless. The other downside is I hope you guys can all sign in without needing gmail accounts. I'm not sure how that's going to work. Keep me apprised as to possible problems.

Guess what? Polar bears are in trouble...

and they are SO CUTE! And the White House knows it! They're finally being considered for threatened status, and the admin. admits that they're threatened because of thinning sea ice caused by climate change. It's all very well and good (and quite Christmasy! is this one's name Tiny Tim?) but they still won't officially say that *humans* cause this thinning ice, because then we'd be responsible for changing our daily actions and not having SUVs...which not even a polar bear with its paws tucked under its chest can make us give up. Idea: let's just name an SUV after it, and then we'll be squaresies.

MediaCommons

MediaCommons is a project for media scholars, students, and anyone interested. One of the people behind it is one of the Flow founders. It's worth perusing, even if you're not into media studies, just to see a fairly innovative use of web publishing for academic ends. Or, you know, to read about the homonormativity of Project Runway. C'mon, homonormativity. They have a "call for papers," but they're using the term "paper" conceptually -- they're really after "works of digital scholarship."

Having worked with Flow as well as a host of non-academic web publications, I'm pretty interested in efforts like this. One good thing with web-based things is that it can really cut down on the time drag in academic publishing, which is totally disruptive to things like television studies -- by the time people can publish about shows, they've gone off the air.

"MediaCommons is a response to the host of systemic problems that afflict academic publishing today. Scholarship -- and particularly scholarship in a field as fast-moving as media studies -- is hindered by the often debilitating time-lag between the completion of a piece of writing and its publication, and by yet more delays between the publication of that text and release of any reviews or responses to it. ...

The combination of such structural problems in academic publishing has resulted in an increasing sense of disconnection among scholars, whose work requires a give-and-take with peers, and yet is produced in greater and greater isolation. These problems are particularly acute for media studies scholars, who need the ability to quote from the multi-mediated materials they write about, and for whom form needs to be able to follow content, allowing not just for writing about mediation but writing in a mediated environment."

Writing in a "mediated environment" sounds fantastic. I'll be interested to see how this plays out. I know I've really valued being able to bring video and images into conference presentations; being able to do that easily with my papers/writings would, I believe, be really advantageous.

Rocky's Great Chinese Ancestor

Once again the NYTimes has run an article about the discovery of a new animal complete with action painting. Who are these artists and how did they get into this fantastic line of work?

As for the newly discovered mammal:
"...the scientists say it shows that mammals experimented with aerial life about the same time birds first took to the skies, perhaps even earlier."

YouTube - Barack Obama Announces Candidacy for President

YouTube - Barack Obama Announces Candidacy for President

I can't figure out how to have the clip up on the website.

Global Jeremiad?

I haven't seen the full text, but from the description in the NYT it seems like it.

East Austin's gentryfickashun makes the nat'l news

In case anybody missed this from the NYT yesterday.

Dinosaur Comics

Carly. I just started reading them a couple days ago (see how behind the Internet times I am?) and I cannot stop. Here is one that goes right along with my dumb "Jurassic Park" paper. Click on the link to see it in actual readable form. May you all procrastinate as I have procrastinated.

The usual term is "creative writing"

So, Ian McEwan got accused of plagiarism. The case against him seems pretty weak, and he winds up defending himself. His defense is basically a definition of "research," amounting to an admittance that he learned various historical details from reading other books. The really interesting part of this, though, is that a lot of writers, including the notoriously reclusive Thomas Pynchon, have rushed to his defense, saying that this level of scrutiny says very bad things for their art, and detailing the ways that their own works involve "plagiarism" at McEwan's level.

This has some relation to the current debates over copyright legislation/enforcement, and is of course, interesting due to the types of discussions still happening in the wake of the James Frey scandal and the Kaavya Viswanathan debacle and that whole James T. LeRoy thing. As much as I find Viswanathan's actions dubious, I'm ambivalent about Frey, and pretty nonplussed about LeRoy. How "original" do new works have to be? How exposed should their sources be? And, really, who gets to decide if things in creative works are true?

Random postmodernism generator

Sorry to make this the me-blog again (briefly), but my friend just sent me this, which randomly generates a theory-heavy essay every time you refresh from the link at the end. Is funny/funny/anti-intellectual/funny.

Against Said

On Salon today, a review of a book by Robert Irwin: _Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents_. Salient quote: "Irwin maintains that Said's thesis is false, the arguments he made for it dishonest, distorted and weak, and his theoretical framework self-contradictory and evasive. He charges that Said engaged in a counterfactual rewriting of history, attacking figures from earlier eras because they did not say or do what Said thought they should have. Said's entire project, in his view, is 'a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is difficult to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations.'"

The article holds Irwin up as a bonafide scholar in the field (and thus touts the book as a major reimagining): "Irwin teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, has written on Arabic literature and art, and is the Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement." Sounds credible, though "written on Arabic literature and art"? That's a little weird. I've written on nudists and forest porn and am no expert in sexuality...Still, the book sounds like it could be important. Anybody else heard anything about it?

Oh, now I'm pissed.

The Bush Admin. has apparently begun shutting down libraries run by the EPA, with the flimsy excuse that they need to save some money. The agency says they're going to digitize the lost material, a lot of which is data re: the effects of industry on the environment, but there's no money allocated for that (see previous sentence re: saving money) and the Union of Concerned Scientists say they doubt it'll happen...