I’m back in Claremont for a few days, for a couple of departmental events.  Because I’ve rented out the condo, I’m spending these few days crashed on a friend’s sofa.  Not to mention hiding from anyone who might want to take advantage of my presence to ask me to do something for them.

Note to the world:  I am not available to do things for you!

It’s fascinating being here without really being here, living on the margins in the town where your home is.

At some point in December, during a conversation over dinner with one of R.’s colleagues, I said something that prompted him to hand me Anneli Rufus’s Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto.  I’m not sure what it was I said, but the book certainly spoke to me, or at least to part of me.

Party of One is an impassioned defense of lonerism, aimed in no small part at reassuring those who have been accused of being standoffish and cold by family, friends, and colleagues that they are not manifesting deep character defects, but are instead simply of a type that requires a lower degree of social interaction (which I understand to be measured both quantitatively and qualitatively) than the majority of folks do.  The book also works to rescue the loner from its associations with criminals ranging from the pedophile to the serial killer, demonstrating the difference between genuinely wanting to be alone—enjoying one’s privacy, finding solitude productive, etcetera—and being an outcast whose remove from social networks is neither produced voluntarily (but rather is a product of either ostracism or having something to hide) nor productive of pleasure (but instead of the kinds of anger that results in antisocial behavior).

All this is good, and does the trick of redrawing the distinction between “loner” and “loser” in a way that is deeply affirming to one who needs lots of time alone, who doesn’t readily make social connections, who finds interacting with others at times to be unnatural and a bit exhausting.  But something grated on me as I read the book, and I’ve been attempting to uncover the source of the irritation for the last week or so.  Here’s where I think it lies:  Rufus associates the loner with the figure of the “rugged individualist,” that peculiarly American extension of Enlightenment ideas of human nature and values.  This is an archetype that I find particularly noxious, largely because of the ideological uses to which it’s been put—the kind of libertarian posturing that stops reading Rousseau after the “nobility man in a state of nature” part, and fails to go on to the “degeneration into brutishness without an appropriate social contract” part.  I don’t believe that the individual precedes, or can exist outside of, its environment.  Nor do I believe that the desires of any one person for a life more private than public indicates that said person is more closely hewing to some kind of individualist ideal.  If anything, the chafing produced in such loners by the surrounding society seems to me to indicate the prior demands of the community, the ways in which we can never really exist apart but are always caught up in the mechanisms of the world around us, responsible both to ourselves and to others for its happy functioning.

So what I’d really like to see someone take on, rather than the pure defense of the individual apart that Rufus presents, is the question of these contrary demands.  Can a loner be a socialist?  Better still, a social constructionist?  Can I vant to be alone without needing to decry affirmative action and the personal income tax?  Where, exactly, is the conjunction of personal philosophy and political theory, and how can their contradictory demands be balanced?

So the forthcoming book now has a page at B&N.com and Amazon.  Which seems to suggest it’s actually going to come into physical being in the world at some point between now and May 30.  Which is awesome.

But:  I’m still waiting on the page proofs.  Which means that said book still has no index.

And:  I’m quite amused by B&N’s “more on this subject” classifications for the book.  “American fiction -> History and criticism,” yes.  “Popular culture -> United States,” of course.  “Literacy -> United States,” by all means.  But “Archaeology -> Guatemala”?  Mighty curious what produced that link.

You know what’s crossing my mind these days?  Attempting to migrate this here blog over to WordPress.  WP is both faster and lighter, and is much more integrated with a number of other services (like Technorati, for instance) than my current blogging engine.  There are at least a couple of problems that immediately spring to mind, however:

1.  I don’t want to break every incoming link I’ve got, so I’d have to find a way to get WP to use the permalink structure that I’ve already got in place.

2.  WP has no documented system for importing from my engine, so I’d have to do a generic RSS import, which seems risky to me.

And then there’s the fact that it’s bound to be a big pain in the rear.  But I keep finding myself thinking about it, nonetheless…

(Crossposted from ElectraPress.)

The protracted silence at the ElectraPress blog has no doubt produced an unfortunate dissipation of attention and energies, but I hope that those of you still poking around there will keep poking around, and that those of you with things to contribute will, in fact, contribute them.  There are Big Things happening behind the scenes, Things that I can’t yet make public, but that will move this enterprise forward rather rapidly, rather soon.

Excuses and disclaimers out of the way, this post and some number of posts to follow will focus on current experiments in publishing (particularly, though not exclusively, academic publishing), and I hope that we might begin some discussions exploring what ElectraPress might learn from them.

First up, a couple of projects (and a project in development) from the Institute for the Future of the Book (see also the associated if:book blog) that are attempting to push the boundaries of the blog, rethinking the relationship between the kinds of intellectual work that gets done in blog posts and discussions and the kinds of work more traditionally made public in other venues, such as books and galleries:

• IT IN place:  artist Alex Itin describes his blog, created as part of his tenure as artist-in-residence at the Institute, as “a scroll on which my brain is splayed.” As Bob Stein suggests, Alex’s interactions with the blog quickly outstripped the Institute’s hopes for what he’d do, evolving and developing as the technologies with which he was working found their way into his art.  IT IN place has become not a place to talk about the work, and not an alternative space in which to view the work, but a fundamental part of the work itself.
• Without Gods:  Mitchell Stephens, a professor of journalism at NYU and the author of several books, including The Rise of the Image, The Fall of the Word, is at work on a history of atheism, and is blogging the writing of the book—again, not just writing about the writing of this book, but putting the book’s ideas into circulation and discussion as he’s working, in ways that are changing the shape of the book as he works.
• And, finally, a project in process:  McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory.  In this blog-to-be, Wark is going to publish his forthcoming book serially, with room both for discussion by readers and for revision and versioning of the original text based on those discussions.  Right now, the folks at the Institute are wrestling with the shape of this forthcoming blog, in a most literal sense:  how can the page be laid out such that the discussion of the text isn’t hidden behind the scenes, but is in fact given the same kinds of authority as the original posts?  Can the blog be made horizontal rather than vertical?  This discussion is ongoing over at if:book, and promises to result in a fascinating new model for the networked book.

Take a look at these projects—in what directions do they spur your imagination?  How might the electronic press of the future make use of some of these innovations?

Suffering a bout of post-travel flatness.  Wishing to be back in bed, or perhaps under it, where it’s darker.  Will hope to resume normal operations shortly.

Sounds to me like last night we had the first SOTU put together entirely out of samples of previous recordings.

Or at least that’s how it reads.  I wouldn’t know, because I didn’t take it in first-hand.  Stuff’s like nails on a chalkboard to me.  Can’t bear listening to it.