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

Like my pal Sean, I have been spending a lot more time on Twitter lately than on this blog. Twitter has become a great place to “link dump” the usual assortment of sites, articles, and essays I would have posted in “Weekend Reading” and other places. I should probably place a Twitter widget in my sidebar.

I would like this blog to focus more on my own work. It is fun to blog about a variety of things, but it becomes rather tiresome due to the lack of interaction here. I do not get a lot of comments in general and the thought of just talking to myself is pretty boring. But this is not a whiny plea for more people to interact on this blog, it is just a honest assessment of the situation.

(Things could be worse: Feministing had to shut their comments down this past weekend due to some pretty sick misogynistic trolling on their posts recently)

I understand why I do not get a lot of comments: there are plenty of other blogs who cover my interests, whether they be literature, theory, women’s rights, new media, or whatever else. Being the fortieth blogger to comment on the latest article about Borges, or whoever, probably puts me pretty low in the commenting queue for most people I am pretty certain.

I have been looking at other blogs a lot lately for inspiration. I like what good friends like Toni and Scott have been doing. Their blogs are only updated when there is actually something important to blog about (although ironically I was the unnamed student who “chastised” Scott about his lack of blogging a few years ago. I was gentle, I swear! Heh.).

So I think the best thing for me to do is keep my blog focused on my own work. Whether it is discussion of recent books I have read (which I am about ten books behind, and counting, on right now!) or my graduate school work or anything else. I will leave the link dumping to my Twitter account.

• I am going to catch up on the LBC’s coverage of Matthew Sharpe’s new novel Jamestown. Scott over at Conversational Reading has some links to keep abreast of what is going on elsewhere in regards to the novel. I am going to try to check it out during the fall.

• Ready Steady Blog links to an article about John Barth. The comment section also has some useful links I am looking into.

• Via Grand Text Auto, the new issue of the Iowa Review Web is now online, which was partially guest edited by Stephanie Strickland.

• Daniel at The Reading Experience links to a Vanity Fair article about Arthur Miller. I don’t hold biographical trivia about authors in high regard for the most part, but I am curious to learn more about Miller’s relationship with his son, who has Down’s Syndrome. Miller is in my thoughts a lot lately because I will be reading two of his plays for a class this fall.

• A few weeks ago The New Yorker had an interesting article about Google’s book scanning project and the snags it is hitting because of lawsuits. Interestingly enough, right after I first typed this bullet point a BBC news article came up in my reader about Microsoft criticizing Google’s program.

• The spring issue of The Quarterly Conversation is now online. Among the contributors this time are some of my favorite bloggers: Scott Esposito from Conversational Reading, Derik Badman from MadInkBeard, and Dan Green from The Reading Experience.

• A Jeanette Winterson manuscript was found on a train in England. By a fan hilariously enough.

• If you have time in July, head to Wisconsin to check out the GLS conference.

• The Reading Experience has another post about John Dewey up.

• One of my favorite pieces of Transformers fan fiction is A Chance In A Million. Now that I think about it, it might have been the first one I ever read too when I got back into the fandom in 1997.

• Scott over at Conversational Reading finds War & Peace to be a bit of a disappointment. I started reading it back in high school but never finished it. Maybe I will pick that up again this summer.

• It seems that I link to a Marjane Satrapi interview almost every week. This week’s interview is from Nerve:

I have to tell you something: I never felt as free as when I wrote Chicken with Plums. When I write about women, and obviously when I write about myself like in Persepolis people relate [the text] to me. In this book, the main character in is a man. I could hide behind him, yet in some ways, he is me. I can be very cynical, but I can also die of love.

• Incoming Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is interviewed over at Mother Jones:

Third, I want to take a look at some of the good things that are being done around the rest of the world that are almost never discussed in the United States. How often is it discussed that the American people work the longest hours of any industrialized country in the world? The two-week paid vacation is almost a thing of the past; meanwhile in Europe you get four to six weeks vacation, and maternity leave with pay. We don’t know about these things. I want to take a look around the world and see what workers are receiving, and compare that to the United States” from an educational point of view.

Some links for this weekend

• Two essays from the first issue of Watcher Junior: an essay about the Apollinian and Dionysian balance in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and another on the “shadow selves” of Buffy and Spike.

• The Reading Experience has three posts up about the essential John Dewey book Art As Experience.

• The Boston Globe on the fiftieth anniversary of Lolita.