I’ve intended for the last couple of weeks to begin writing in here about my new project, or about my intent toward that project, in any event.  Or, for that matter, about things I’m reading, things I’m watching, and so on.  It’s one of my goals over the course of this summer, in preparation for next year, to find ways to take this site seriously, both as a locus of research and as an avenue for new kinds of writing.  I haven’t done so yet, obviously.  I’m having trouble getting started, and I’m trying to figure out why.

There are a couple of reasons that I came up with during my weekend ponderings.  The first is a pair of unspoken, unexamined guidelines I seem to have set for myself (pretty much unawares) when I started this blog:

1.  Don’t write about work.

2.  Don’t write about your personal life.

There are extremely sensible reasons for these guidelines:  writing about work, for instance, as other bloggers have discovered, is a risky proposition.  The good news about life in the academy, though, is that there are very few proprietary secrets that one risks giving away; in fact, a substantive enough percentage of my work is sufficiently personal that, in writing about it, I’d be writing about no one but me.  The risk, then, resides in sending ideas out into the world before they’re fully formed, in inviting disagreement with whatever half-baked nonsense I produce.  But then:  isn’t that the point of an academic blog?

Not writing about my personal life, on the other hand, seems pretty sensible to me, if I intend to take this space seriously as a professional venture.  So that guideline will likely stand.

The other major reason for my lack of writerly focus is bound up in the pragmatics of scholarly production:  I completed my first book manuscript near the end of last summer, and spent the intervening academic year shopping for a publisher.  It’s been a deeply demoralizing process, and I have a nice sheaf now of letters that tell me how smart and interesting my project sounds, but (a) our humanities list has been slashed, and so we can’t take your project on, or (b) the all-purpose ‘your project doesn’t quite fit our list.’ I’m happy to report that one brave press did offer to read the manuscript, and has sent it out to outside reviewers—which is the good news.  The bad news is that I’ve been playing the waiting game since March, wondering whether the press will ultimately take the book, and if so, what revisions they’ll want from me, and thus as a consequence resisting getting started on a new project before the old one is safely in press.

So here’s the question:  how do you get started?  How do you start writing about ideas you’re not yet sure about?  How do you start allowing pieces of a new project to be seen publicly when you know they’re unfinished?  And how do you start that new project when the previous one’s still lingering in the background?

To be found here.  Who knew.  God love Movable Type.

[UPDATE 5.27.04: post-migration, various feeds are now in the menubar.]

Neal Stephenson, author of the riotous Snow Crash, the envy-inspiring The Diamond Age, and the at times breathtaking Cryptonomicon is returning to the Waterhouse and Shaftoe families for a bit of a prequel.  On September 23, 2003, Quicksilver hits the bookstores.

A few things to note from that last link:  Quicksilver will apparently run 944 pages, thus exceeding the heft of Cryptonomicon by a full 26 pages.  More importantly, however, Quicksilver is billed as “volume 1” of the Baroque Cycle.  Rumor has it said cycle will extend to three volumes.

Which makes it seem possible that, by the time all’s written and printed, the saga of the Waterhouse and Shaftoe clans—and the interconnected history of post-Enlightenment technologies—could run to nearly 4000 pages.  Move over, Michener.

And hurray for the Supreme Court.

According to the New York Times (subscription required), the crotchety ones have briefly emerged from the 1950s to strike down, by a 6-to-3 margin, anti-sodomy laws across the country.  Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy argued that gay people “are entitled to respect for their private lives,” and that “the state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”

Now, here’s a sentence you’d never have expected to see attached to this story:  “Joining Justice Scalia’s dissent were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas.” Boy, I just never saw that one coming.

Scalia is, however, always good for a chuckle; taking the unusual step of reading his dissent from the bench, he made a point of noting that “the court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda,” before adding that he has nothing personal against homosexuals.

Now, I hadn’t realized that those homosexual types had an actual agenda, but I figure any agenda that keeps Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas out of my bedroom is okay by me.  Where do I sign up?

I’d hoped to write something of substance today, something considering the impact that the Supreme Court’s Monday half-decision on affirmative action will have on higher education, or perhaps another bit of reportage from the Amsterdam/Prague trip.  Or maybe something looking forward to the new projects I’m actually beginning this summer.

Instead, I am tinkering with the site.  And tinkering is something I should really not be allowed to do, as we can see from past experience.  (I’d intended to link to a second bit of stupidity there, but apparently I wisely chose not to broadcast it.  Surprising to find myself showing discretion.)

Anyhoo, here’s the newest bit of idiocy:  In attempting to install Dean Allen’s Refer, I’ve been playing with the .htaccess file.  Suddenly, my top-level directory page (which is just a redirect to this page) is downloading instead of opening. [UPDATE:  Fixed.]

Seriously, try it:  http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/.  The index page is index.php, and I’ve got a line in my .htaccess that reads “DirectoryIndex index.php”—so what gives?

Any insights would be most welcome.  And hopefully I can get to that substantive writing soon.

I’d promised some time back to keep you posted on my adventures in the land of consumer electronics.  After a bit of comparison shopping, both for cell-phone/PDA combo devices and for wireless phone services, I wound up buying the Kyocera 7135 and sticking it out with my friends at Verizon.  My service is unimproved, except, of course, for having switched over to a plan that gives me more minutes.  The phone, on the other hand, is a work of genius.

PC Magazine recently gave the 7135 their “Editor’s Choice” designation, and while the Mac-bigot in me wants to be suspicious of both their taste and their motives, I have to admit that I’m with them on this one.  The phone itself is well-designed, with the standard phone keypad that the Treo is missing, but it’s in the plethora of features that the conjunction of phone and PalmOS bring together that the thing really shines.

The first night I had it, I was sitting in a movie theater with a slew of my students, waiting for the preview screening of Matrix Reloaded to start, and kinda goofing around with some of the functions.  I started up the Eudora client on the phone, wondering if I could check my e-mail; forty-five seconds and a few configurations later, my e-mail was merrily downloading to my phone.  The cost?  Plan minutes.  That’s it.

I begin to realize how my geekiness is shining all over that last paragraph, but I’m too enamored of this device to care.

Oh, and BT:  it’s got a built-in MP3 player.  This, however, is its one true failing:  the built-in memory in the thing is too small for any substantive music (16MB), and if you plug in a 64MB memory card, you can almost carry around a whole CD.

The bottom line:  I love this thing, but I’m still hoping for the mythical iPod/Palm/cellphone combo device to become a reality.  But hopefully not too soon; I don’t want to suffer years of technoenvy until I feel I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of this one.

According to the wire services, the Supreme Court has issued a split decision in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases, siding with the law school on the constitutionality of its diversity policy, but declaring the undergraduate school’s admissions policy to be unconstitutional.  An overflow of analysis should shortly follow.

I just discovered this morning that I missed my own one-year anniversary; Planned Obsolescence made its inauspicious debut exactly one year and two days ago, broadcasting from the sunny shores of Waikiki.

Here’s the part that makes me want to overlook the milestone:  in that year, I seem to have lost rather than gained a readership.  Or I have stunned what readers remain into silence.  So I’m left, as one does at such major life junctures, contemplating my options for the future:  A massive self-promotional campaign on other sites far and wide?  A shift from the dry pseudo-intellectualism of the last year’s entries, which fail either to entertain or to enlighten, to a lurid recounting of personal peccadilloes?  Or perhaps—and given my profession, this seems most likely—just a plodding continuation of the current work, but with an attention to the regular publication schedule that was so often let slide this year.

Anyhow, to those of you still frequenting these parts:  thanks for joining me.  Here’s to more, better, soon.

Yes, mania.  According to the Beeb, not only did the Daily News violate the strictest of literary embargoes by running a story that contained “excerpts and details” about the imminent fifth volume in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but a Canadian woman (identified only as “Melissa”) was apparently able to purchase a copy of the book at a local Wal-Mart after the store mistakenly put the book on its shelves several days early.

Fortunately for we poor consumers, the Daily News has been slapped with a lawsuit, and, as the article reports, “Wal-Mart has launched an investigation as to how the books ended up on display.”

The good folks at Scholastic, for their part, are at great pains to explain the altruistic reasons for the embargo, the lawsuit, the investigations, the prosecutions, and so on.  As reported by the Daily News itself, “ ‘The book was embargoed [until 12:01 a.m. Saturday] so all kids would have it at the same time, and not to spoil it for the kids,’ Scholastic spokeswoman Judy Corman said.” And in the BBC story, “A Scholastic spokesman said the company hoped ‘this unfortunate situation will not spoil the surprise for millions of children around the country who have been eagerly awaiting the book.’ “

Of course, none of this would have anything to do with hype, would it?

One of the things one does as a tourist in Prague—one of those musts, like visiting the Eiffel Tower in Paris, or seeing the Empire State Building in New York—is to make the across-the-Charles-Bridge and up-the-hill hike to the Hrad, the castle that looms over both the city and all its literary representations.

The spires, interestingly enough, that are so visible and recognizable in the many postcard images of the castle, belong not to the castle itself, but to St. Vitus’s Cathedral, contained within the Hrad’s third courtyard.  We took a quick spin through the cathedral, which was gorgeously stained-glass lit but impossibly tour-group mobbed, and then wandered outside and around the perimeter of the cathedral.

We meandered past the massive obelisk (modern, and wholly unlabeled) that stands to one side, and were headed further into the courtyard, when I heard music—oom-pah music—emanating from a doorway on our right.  The doorway opened onto a staircase (which, as it turns out, is called the Bull Staircase, and which was designed by the same architect responsible for the obelisk), and it was clear that the music was coming from below, so we headed down to investigate.

It was thus that we stumbled upon a public performance of the Castle Guard and Czech Police Orchestra.

This is a concept, I think, that could quite possibly revolutionize law enforcement in the United States.  Imagine:  The LAPD Orchestra.  The NYPD Concert Choir.  The FBI Ballroom Dance Team.