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

Recently read: Walden & Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.

Reading Walden in high school was an important part of my development as a person and reader. My eleventh grade English teacher spent a good part of the school year on 19th century American writers, especially Thoreau, so I spent a lot of time with the text.

Reading it now, while some ideas are extremely righteous, a lot of this book fails for me. Thoreau’s ideas are simplistic, his prose boring, and much of the second half of the text is rather tedious. It’s an important text, but just a stepping stone to better works.

I read this book via Daily Lit, a site I have been experimenting with a lot this summer.

Not a lot of reading this week. I have been otherwise occupied with a few projects which I will announce next week.

• Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop’s new novel December sounds interesting.

Meanwhile…

• The world’s oldest bible is going to be put online. This is especially interesting given, according to Slashdot, there is no mention of the resurrection. Uh oh.

• Fun Vampires seems to have switched from being more Philadelphia based to more Science Fiction based. Cool. One of their first posts in their new incarnation is a Doctor Who for beginners post.

• While introducing the first French radio broadcast of Waiting For Godot, Beckett’s first words were “I do not know who Godot is.”

• Blogging Woolf has a comprehensive look at recent criticism about Orlando.

On Twitter….

• I am hoping to make it to Digital Humanities 09 next year in Maryland.

• Daily Lit, a site I am using a lot lately, is distributing novels via Twitter.