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

• Daniel Green sums up my thoughts on the book the son of Susan Sontag wrote about her final days much more articulately than I would.  I don’t understand why anyone would want to read that book.
• Papers from perthDAC 2007, including Jill Walker-Rettberg, Christy Dena, and Mary Flanagan all look very interesting.
• Lauren Elkin on Japanese Literature and culture.

• A brief essay on point of view from Daniel Green, focusing on The Virgin Suicides.  I think this will be useful to reference to in the future.
• Open Letters Monthly remembers the recently deceased Phillip Jose Farmer.  I read a few of his novels as a teenager.
• In general I have really been enjoying Glenn Greenwald’s daily columns.  I find his criticisms of the Obama administration to very much mirror my own concerns.
• My program director, Heide Estes’, excellent article on Sir Gawain & The Green Knight.

• 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.

• Christy Dena’s insightful response to Jane McGonigal’s essay The Puppet Master Problem: Design For Real World, Mission-Based Gaming from the Second Person anthology.

• Michael Filas review of N. Katherine Hayles’ My Mother Was A Computer: Digital Subjects & Literary Texts.

• Daniel Green reviews the new James Wood book in the new issue of Open Letters Monthly.

Meanwhile…

• The New Yorker piece on Obama’s early years in Chicago politics is another indicator he is just as scummy and slimy as the next politician. Making the right friends, the right votes, the right influences; you might counter by saying “that’s politics” but I say that if you take part in that crap, I blame you. I’d rather have no government than one filled with slimeballs. None of the above…yet again…in 2008.

• Alexander Solzhenitsyn recently passed away. When we moved to Manahawkin, I remember the first friend I made was reading The Gulag Archipelago at the time. We started to bond while discussing that and other books.

• Io9 offers a guide for fans of the modern Doctor Who series who wish to get into the classic series.

• Scott Esposito comments on the amazing ending of The Mill On The Floss and links to a review of the novel from a 1860 issue of The Atlantic.

• PETA still sucks as much as I remember.

• The long awaited essay on Macedonio Fernandez, Borges’ mentor, in The Quarterly Conversation does not disappoint. I am looking forward to the publication of one of his novels in English next year from Open Letter.

• Also, from The Quarterly Conversation, Grant Bailie’s new novel looks interesting, Bolano receives a lukewarm review for Nazi Literature In The Americas, and Daniel Green covers Donald Barthelme, an author I have wanted to check out for a number of years.

• The New Yorker profiled Hugo Chavez a few weeks ago. I am really not sure what to think of this guy. They also covered former Doctor Who companion Billie Piper’s new show Secret Diary Of A Call Girl.

• Reproductive Rights Blog on vasectomies.

• The New Yorker on itching and the brain.

Meanwhile…

• I am happy to report that Newspaper Blackout Poems (previously discussed) is going to have a full length book published. Very cool.

• StateControl recently devoted an entire podcast to the band Harvey Milk. I have been hearing about this band for a few years, but this was the first time I really checked them out. Pretty good stuff.

On Twitter….

• WordPress 2.6 came out this week. Everyone should upgrade their blogs as soon as possible. The best way I have found is to install this plugin, which takes care of the upgrade rather seamlessly.

• Dr. Kinsella has finished uploading his student’s readings of Paradise Lost from this past semester. I am going to give these a listen soon.

• I am really impressed with the new version of last.fm that was opened up for the public a few days ago. Add me on there. The “neighbors” stream is quite impressive; it gave me artists as varied as Devo, Eric Dolphy, Negative Approach, and The Birthday Party the other night.

Recently read: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.

Barthes’ autobiography that isn’t really an autobiography (as it says on the title page: “it must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel”) is a wonderful, brief, work some of his insights surrounded by childhood pictures and memories. Questions of aesthetics, the standard theoretical quandaries that Barthes treads on, and issue of reading duties follow. Besides some further elaborations on what Barthes began in S/Z the most interesting writing in here is his discourse on sexuality, which I am interested in reading more about. Barthes drops a few thoughts into various texts I have read, but I am curious to read something more in depth.

• Speaking of Barthes, you should also check out Daniel Green’s recent post about him.

• From Fibreculture, Caroline McCaw on the art of Second Life and Axel Bruns looks at used based “produsage.”

• Due to some monetary constraints I was unable to attend ELO 08, but Scott Rettberg posted his presentation over at Grand Text Auto. More on that soon.

• Barrett Hathcock’s essay on the Internet from The Quarterly Conversation.

• Catching up on fiction from The New Yorker: Bolano, Diaz, Eugenides, and a previously untranslated story by Nabokov.

• Seamus Heaney’s 1985 review of Mr. Palomar from the New York Times.

• Daniel Green’s review of the intriguing Lost Books Of The Odyssey.

• The New Yorker had a big piece last week on Keith Olbermann.

Meanwhile, on Twitter…

• The New Republic pays tribute to de Beauvoir.

• Terra Nova covers a promising MMO called Lila Dreams.

• Greg Palast on the preemptive theft of the 2008 election. Speaking of, maybe I should just sleep in anyway.

• My new desktop background (Kind of big and exciting casting spoilers for the finale of Doctor Who)

• Kristin Hersh has a new website.

And…

• Margaret Atwood won a big literary award in Spain.

• A member of the old New York hardcore band Ultra Violence gets a mention in The New Yorker too.