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

• The Guardian on interactive fiction, partnerships between authors and game developers, and a little bit of Douglas Adams.
• Laurie Halse Anderson is interviewed for her new novel Wintergirls.
• Open Letters reviews a recently Broadway performance of Waiting For Godot.
• Kathleen Fitzpatrick on the recent collaboration between HASTAG and MLA on new tenure guidelines.

• The New Yorker on Dracula and other Vampire related media.
• Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s very moving tribute to her colleague David Foster Wallace.
• Performing Subjectivities: Multi-Mimesis in These Waves of Girls
• Jeanette Winterson reviews the new edition of Cosmicomics.
• The Guardian interviews Feministing’s Jessica Valenti.

• 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.

• Jacket Copy links to Sports Illustrated archive, which offers writing from Don Delillo and William Faulkner.  I don’t think either piece is that interesting, but still pretty cool.
• The changing job description of librarians is covered in the New York Times.  I have been thinking about librarians a lot lately as I ponder my future.
• Bernie Sanders, in In These Times, on the failed legacy of Milton Friedman.
• The Guardian of all places has an article about the recent reissues of the classic Indiana hardcore band Zero Boys early work.  They also played a few shows in California last week; word from out there has been overwhelmingly positive about their performance.
• The Atlantic on how the Greeks treated soldiers returning from war.

• 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:

My first post in WP 2.7…I love the new dashboard…

• Two links for Jean-Philippe Toussaint from The Quarterly Conversation: a nice interview and a review of Monsieur from Scott Esposito.
• Literary Kicks on Plato’s Republic.  Been thinking about Plato a lot lately because this is one of the audiobooks in my queue right now.
• My Twitter pal Samhita over at Feministing wonders if a restraining order is ever enough.
• The Guardian does a really cool interview with Herbie Hancock.  I need to check out his solo work; he played on my favorite Miles Davis record In A Silent Way.
• Judith Butler on the November election.