(cross-posted at The Valve)

One of the concerns that often gets raised early in discussions of electronic scholarly publishing is that of business model—how will the venture be financed, and how will its products be, to use a word I hate, monetized?  What follows should not at all suggest that I don’t find such questions important.  Clearly, they’re crucial; unless an electronic press is in some measure self-sustaining, it simply won’t last long.  Foundations might be happy to see such a venture get started, but nobody wants to bankroll it indefinitely.

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As you might guess, this week everybody’s pretty much all about the Final Four around here—both of them.  It promises to be an interesting weekend here in BR.

More posting on non-basketball topics shortly.  But, in the meantime, Geaux Tigers!

For the last month, R. and I have been exercising a lot.  A lot.  And well.  It’s the first time since the marathon—hell, it’s the first time since longer ago than that—that I’ve really felt in some kind of decent shape, in an all-around sense:  I’ve lost a few nagging pounds that I couldn’t drop, things have stopped wobbling and/or pooching quite as much as they were, I’m starting to see actual muscular definition again, and best of all, nothing hurts.  No joint aches, no extremity pain, and only enough muscle soreness to let me know I’ve done something.

We’ve basically alternated days at the gym (which mostly means, for me, time on the elliptical machine) with days of yogalates class.  Yogalates, as you might guess, is a blend of yoga and pilates that’s extremely intensive, combining pilates’s focus on core strength with yoga’s investments in flexibility and balance.  The classes we go to are taught in a heated room, are an hour long, and move through a varying cycle of exercises and poses that work each muscle group in sequence (not to mention getting your heart rate up and making you sweat like a goat).  I walked out after the first eight or so classes I took feeling not unlike cooked spaghetti, completely wrung out and happy though utterly unable to maintain a line of thought for more than a few seconds.  It was awesome.

It remains awesome, though (happily for my productivity) less brain-scrambling than it was at the outset.  I’m thinking pretty hard these days about how I’m going to maintain this kind of exercise schedule when I get back to Claremont, and particularly to teaching, which has a tendency to eat into every bit of personal time I attempt to reserve for myself.  And, in particular, I’m pondering how I’m going to keep something yogalates-like included in my regimen.

There’s a Bikram yoga studio just a few blocks from my condo, and I’m seriously considering going there to check it out when I get home.  But I’m got certain kinds of anxieties about Bikram, anxieties that I could stand to have dispelled before I go forward with this.  Mostly these concerns have to do with the heat:  while the studio I’m now attending is heated, class temperatures generally fall somewhere between 80 and 90 degrees, I think, and I can definitely tell the difference between hotter days and less hot days, and between hotter areas of the room and less hot spots.  Generally speaking, hotter = more mashed-potatolike feeling at end of class.  So this is why I’m concerned: the Bikram place near me says that its studio is heated to 100 degrees, and that’s a hefty number more degrees.  Will there be nausea?  Danger of passing out?  Brain-deadness?

I’d appreciate any advice.  I’m asking in no small part because I need to stop thinking about this already so I can get back to work…

A philosophical question that, at the moment, seems worthy of Berkeley:  would they be my Tigers without the palpitations?

This has not been the most productive week ever, I have to admit.  Not only did I spend a fair chunk of time watching Brideshead, but two days went almost in their entirety to reading Reading Lolita in Tehran, and another chunk of time to finally finishing the His Dark Materials trilogy.  It’s all been terrific fun, but none of it has felt productive in the way that reading or watching something new that you have some intent of someday doing something with feels.

That said:  whatever.  Isn’t this part of what a sabbatical is for?  It comes as little shock to me that it’s taken me this long to read the Pullman, precisely because I first learned about it almost four years ago, right at the tail end of my last sabbatical, as I was trying to bear down through the last of the pile of stuff I’d set myself to read during that leave.  I went searching the blogosphere yesterday, though, because I was trying to remember where it was that the Pullman first came to my attention.  It turns out that, as I’d thought, I first heard about the trilogy from BT; what I’d forgotten was that (a) BT’s was the first blog I read with any regularity, and (b) his post about the trilogy appeared just a few days after I’d started Planned Obsolescence.

So, a mere three years and nine months later, I can respond:  I completely agree, BT.  The first two volumes are absolutely breathtaking, but the third feels scattered, narratively uncoiled.  This is perhaps reflected in the titles:  while the golden compass and the subtle knife are absolutely crucial to Lyra and Will’s missions in the first two novels (and yes, I know the first was originally entitled Northern Lights in the British edition, but still), the amber spyglass just doesn’t figure as significantly.  It appears quite late, it mostly only tells us what we’ve already come to figure out, and it’s under the control of a character who—though everybody else in those universes seems to indicate her importance as the “tempter,” the serpent to Will and Lyra’s Adam and Eve—just doesn’t do all that much.  What choice does she present them with, that they wouldn’t have come across on their own?  I finished the third volume feeling paradoxically both the kind of pleasure that I find in wrapping up a long lived-in fictional universe and the kind of frustration that comes when it just doesn’t add up.  Something feels missing, or perhaps I just missed it.

But aside from the novels themselves, part of the pleasure of finishing the trilogy was in feeling as though, with this post, I’d be able to bring Planned Obsolescence full-circle in a way I hadn’t counted on, to feel the narrative interconnections of this fictional universe growing.

DN points out in the comments down below that he called last night’s victory.  This post is for DN:

Yeah, you totally did.  I only felt safe enough to call it once Bérubé made the fatal mistake of dissing the Tigers in favor of the mysterious Iona (see link in previous post, and particularly comment number 6), at which point it seemed clear that spite was working in our favor.  Before that, we were operating under my public-declaration curse, in which anything I pronounce out loud as being authoritatively so is immediately and resoundingly contravened.

Ask my pal Marcus about this; he can confirm.

The problem with this is that the curse only operates if I really and truly mean it, and thus any public statement I make about the outcome of Sunday’s game with Texas will be read through that lens; i.e., if I say that we’re absolutely going to get trampled, in the hopes that the curse produces another glorious victory, the purpose of the statement may perfectly well override its content.  I can therefore say nothing, except that I have no clue what’s going to happen.

This is a complication of the performative that I think J. L. Austin may have missed.

From the bottom of my heart, for that most misguided first-round pick, which allowed me to snark at you in a way that the gods of March clearly heard.

Not only have I spent the week watching Brideshead Revisited (but on VHS; you remember VHS tapes, don’t you?  I’d nearly forgotten that you have to rewind them, a real bother if you ask me), but I also just this week joined Netflix and got my first shipment from them.

My, the things that are about in the world today.

Over the last 24 hours, I’ve gotten hundreds of hits off of a pack of googlers looking for spoilers for the current season of The Sopranos.  Which is odd.  Here I was trying to be all scrupulous about not giving away the big thing that happened at the end of episode 1, and everybody else in the world seems to be looking for the scoop on the rest of the season.

This is a phenomenon that kinda baffles me.  Do you guys read the end of a novel first?  I know there are folks who do; I know people who can’t bear the suspense, and so have to know how it turns out before they begin.  But the suspense is the majority of the pleasure for me—wondering if I can work out the puzzle before it’s solved, and, in fact, really hating it when I can.  Finding out from an outside source how something turns out can entirely destroy the pleasure in the text for me.

That said, I do love to speculate about a text-in-progress; speculation below the fold.

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(crossposted from ElectraPress)

As I mentioned sometime back, things have been happening behind the scenes at ElectraPress, and all that set-building and light-hanging has prevented me from being able to do much in the way of actual performing there, in front of the curtain.

But now, at last, I can fill you in on what’s been going on.  Back in January, after the “On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements” post ran at The Valve, I was invited to New York to visit the Institute for the Future of the Book, and particularly to have some conversations with Bob Stein, the Institute’s founder, about how I imagined ElectraPress developing, and where I wanted to see it go.

In the course of our talks, Bob proposed an alliance, one I happily accepted.  We’re working together to establish an all-electronic scholarly press, to be hosted by the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC (where the Institute is likewise housed).  We imagine that this press will, for the time being, focus in the area of media studies; the projects that the press will publish will take many forms, many different lengths, and many different structures, but all will be “born digital,” and all will be rigorously peer reviewed—though through a newly reimagined peer review system that will make use of the network in its process.

We are now in the thick of imagining how this press might be structured, how it might function, and, most importantly, how it might transform scholarly communication.  We’re trying to think both idealistically and pragmatically, puzzling through how we can create a publishing system that allows for the greatest possible range of innovation while still maintaining a broad level of acceptance within current academic structures.  To that end, we’re holding a meeting in late April, bringing together a group of faculty and technologists, folks working in English, Media Studies, Film, and Information Science, to spend a day thinking out loud about the future of electronic scholarly publishing and the possibilities presented by ElectraPress.

But given that one of our hopes is to spend this meeting thinking about what happens when academic writing becomes fully networked—and not least what kinds of conversations among scholars might spring up in the process—we thought we’d begin our discussions now, online.

Moreover, we want to bring as many people into these conversations as possible, particularly people like you who have a stake in the outcome of our discussion.  We wished that it were possible to get everybody who’s interested around that table in late April, though we simply couldn’t.  But what the realities of facilities and funding make impossible, the network allows us to circumvent.  We’ve set up an online conference on the Institute for the Future of the Book’s server, hoping to use the month between now and the meeting to stimulate as many ideas about electronic scholarly publishing as possible.

I’d like to ask you all to join us there soon, and continuing over the course of the next few weeks, so that we can begin thinking together about the kinds of projects that ElectraPress will be building upon and the kinds of possibilities that are ahead of us.