Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Pedagogy. Linux.

• In These Times on nazi skinheads in the military.
• In the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation, Scott Esposito looks on a new anthology of Mexican literature.
• Literary Kicks reviews a new production of Porgy & Bess.  Miles Davis’ soundtrack to the film is one of my favorite albums he recorded during the fifties.
• More hardcore in The Guardian: this time it is a profile of Discord Records.
• All About Jazz reviews Black Flag’s mostly instrumental and always excellent Family Man and Process Of Weeding Out albums.

This week’s video is from a CBS appearance Davis did in 1958, the same year as his adaptation of Porgy & Bess.  He performs So What, from the Kind Of Blue album.  Jimmy Cobb is on drums and, oh yeah, some guy named John Coltrane is playing saxophone as well.

• Daniel Green writes about Dewey’s Art as Experience yet again.
• Fred Hammer from It’s Alive Fanzine interviews Greg Cameron, who drummed for the excellent SST band October Faction over at Double Cross.
• Grand Text Auto announces a new issue of New River.  There are some really good works of electronic literature in this issue which I will comment on soon.
• The rather famous, it seems, classic game Oregon Trail is being ported to the IPhone.  Hopefully a version for the Nintendo DS will come afterwards.

This week’s video is another from Black Flag.  It is from, I am pretty sure, the same show the Live 84 record was recorded.  Check out Greg Ginn absolutely shredding on guitar, with Kira and Bill backing him up.  Easily the best era of Black Flag.

• The Institute For The Future Of The Book sums up my ill feelings about John Updike:

His death is, in a sense, another nail in the coffin of a kind of literary vanguard. I can understand why this blog’s readership might relish, openly or in private, the extinction of these writers, particularly given the old school’s knee-jerk aversion to new methodologies and shifting boundaries. By 2006, as the sensationally-titled “The End of Authorship” attests, it seemed that Updike opposed progress in the humanities more than he furthered it. The voguish sentiment, for better or worse, was disdain for his belletristic ways.

• This surreal story from Rolling Stone about the fallout of a sexual relationship between a student and teacher is equal parts surreal, disturbing in ways that get worse with each page, but also not surprising.
• Henry Jenkins on creating fan fiction with Twitter.  I am a lot more enthusiastic about it than he is, having been following the Twitter characters created for the excellent Mad Men series he mentions for awhile now.  This reminds me a lot of the, based in Livejournal, AIM accounts a number of fans created for Buffy The Vampire Slayer characters.  They were fun to interact with and stayed in character really well.  Twitter is a much more interesting medium for this sort of thing.
• The new issue of Game Studies is now out.
• Jane McGonigal on why she is not a game evangelist.

This week’s video is Black Flag from the same show the Saccharine Trust footage was taken from.  You’ll want to especially pay attention to Greg Ginn’s ridiculous guitar playing.

• I’ve never been a big fan of John Updike, but anytime we lose a big literary figure like him it is probably worth taking another look.  The Guardian offer their view on the essential works of Updike.
• Conversational Reading has been publishing a series of interviews about publishing during a recession.  One of my favorite presses, New Directions, was recently asked to contribute.
• I’m not a huge fan of the band Half Off, but I have always thought their vocalist Billy Rubin had a lot of interesting things to say.  My friends at Double Cross recently had him write about his time in Half Off.  Hopefully he will write about Haywire, his band after Half Off, soon.

Half Off never had an issue with straight edge. I was straight edge (and I suppose I still am). We had an issue with people that were turning straight edge into a fashion statement or a club/gang. It was disturbing to see something so important being turned into a commodity. That commodity was being used as a wedge to exclude people from the punk/hardcore scene rather than embrace the diversity fostered by the DIY attitude that had made punk rock a force to be reckoned with. It seemed to me that the straight ege thing to do was embrace the people with drug/alcohol problems (not attack them). The other thing that became prevalent in the scene was the “tough guy” image that went along with being “hard”. I still don’t know what that means outside of a description of a penis.

This week’s video is of the excellent band Saccharine Trust.  I am a big fan of their first album, Pagan Icons.  It is a great combination of early hardcore, rock, and some of the free jazz influence a lot of bands on SST Records had at the time.  Here they are playing at the University Of Connecticut in 1984 (with Black Flag by the way):

• 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:

• Jeanette Winterson on art during a recession.
• Norman Thomas di Giovanni’s Website dedicated to Borges and his censored translations is very interesting and worth spending some time with.
• 2666 reviews: The New York Review Of Books, New York Times, The Quarterly Conversation
• Part two of Tony Rettman’s interview with Joe Carducci.
• Finally, via my friend Clevo, two videos of Black Flag.  One is from the Target video near the beginning of Henry Rollins’ time with the band.  The other is a few years, and a lot more hair, later with the classic lineup of Greg Ginn, Rollins, Kira, and Bill Stevenson.

Recently read: Raymond Pettibon: A Reader

Growing up on punk and hardcore, Raymond Pettibon’s flyers for Black Flag and SST Records’ bands in general were a big influence on me. It is kind of weird that he is revered by the larger art scene now, but this is a cool reader put together for an exhibit of his work a few years back.

Pettibon’s drawings are obviously raging, but the academic essays about him are pretty bad. One basically calls the stuff he drew for SST “juvenile.” This is why people from outside of hardcore should NEVER write about hardcore. Still, a cool collection of drawings and excerpts from a lot of writing as varied as King Solomon, Ruskin, Borges, Sterne, Heidegger, etc.