What I had intended was a series of daily updates.  Of course, I also thought that I was going to use my hotel’s gym several times this weekend, so I clearly had some misunderstandings about how general time management was going to function while in New Orleans.  But then, time management issues are not unusual in this city:  there’s a reason why so many waiters and bartenders in NOLA are, or were, at least, in the years before Katrina, fortyish men whom we used to refer to collectively as the Lost Boys.  Many of them moved to New Orleans at 18 or so, found themselves caught up in the music and the food and the nightlife, and next thing they knew two decades had gone by, and whatever plans they’d come here with had drifted away, like smoke in the breeze.

Fortunately, this was only a weekend, and one that was meant to be lost, anyhow.

Read the rest of this entry »

I drove into New Orleans late last night, and will be heading out to Jazz Fest later this afternoon.  Given the darkness, I wasn’t able to get an overall sense of the city’s state, though I did see, right off the bat, that big stretches of the city seemed much more unlit than they used to, and that nearly every streetlamp lining the freeway was canted at a slightly odd angle.  After leaving the freeway, the state of things became much more clear:  Canal Street north of Rampart (the part not focused on tourism) looks like a war zone, nearly every building boarded up, barricades everywhere.

This morning at breakfast, reading through the front section of the Times-Picayune, I ran across this:

I couldn’t get a clear image with my cell phone’s camera, but these are the paper’s Official Notices pages, three full pages, each with eight columns, each with entry after entry declaring that

The City of New Orleans gives official notification that it intends to demolish or haul away the home/property located at [address].  The City of New Orleans determined that this property [is in imminent danger of collapse/is in the right of way] and must be removed.  A legal owner who disputes the proposed demolition must present their objections in writing to the Department of Safety and Permits of the City of New Orleans before the thirty (30) working days are up.  The City of New Orleans makes no legal representation that relief will or will not be granted.

Column after column.  Home after home.  And I can’t help but wonder what percentage of these property owners will ever even see these notices?

More from Jazz Fest, later this weekend.

Two posts this morning, the first of which makes the second one possible.  Post the first:

Back in December, I think, when I first got my Verizon CDMA RAZR V3c, I found a discussion board post with information on how to edit iSync in order to link up with the phone via Bluetooth and synchronize contacts and calendars.  This was made possible because Verizon had failed to do its usual job of disabling OBEX on the new phones.  I followed the directions, set up my desktop computer to synchronize, and promptly got all my contacts and calendars linked up.  But, for whatever reason, I never followed this by setting up my laptop to sync.

And, in the meantime, Apple released iSync 2.2, which theoretically enabled synchronizing with the V3c, but which in practice actually disabled what I was able to do before.  So I did some tinkering this morning, and managed to get things working again.

I post this both for the benefit of anyone else trying to sync to a Verizon CDMA RAZR V3c, but also so that I can remember what I did in the event the next release of iSync re-disables actual synchronizing.  I make no promises about this working, however; if you tinker around with this stuff, you do so at your own risk.

Read the rest of this entry »

The alarm went off this morning at 4.30, waking me after a much too brief four and a half hours of sleep.  I woke up groggy and dehydrated and otherwise feeling the effects of the two glasses of Shiraz I drank last night.  I stumbled into the bathroom, put my lenses in, cranked up the shower, and…

By turning the knob all the way over to the far end of hot, I was able to obtain the barest trickle of water that hovered between tepid and flat-out cold.

At least it made me move quickly.  I got myself ready, headed to the lobby to check out, and managed to miss the airport shuttle while explaining the shower problem to the desk representative.

But at least this gave me a chance to grab a cup of coffee in the lobby.  Even if they did charge me for it.  And the next shuttle did come just a few minutes later, and the driver helped me with my bag.  Of course, I did manage to spill my coffee on myself, but it seemed to clean up okay.

And moving through the airport went reasonably well.  Even though I had to undress, practically, going through security, the TSA guys were really helpful in getting my stuff through the machines, and the guy ahead of me helped me drag one of my bins along the table.  And for once, the gate I’m flying out of is not at the far end of the terminal, and it turns out to be right across the hall from the President’s Club.

So here’s the thing:  4.30 am lightly hungover wakeup, cold shower, LAX—and I’m still in a good mood.  Inexplicably so.

I’m at USC today, in a room with a bunch of smart folks, thinking about the future of academic publishing.  So far, the conversation has been fascinating.  I’m taking notes, and will look forward to distilling and discussing them.

Good gravy, but I’m useless on a Friday afternoon.  I’ve gotten nowhere in the drafting process today, not least because my usual morning yogalates class completely and totally kicked my ass.  Since then, I’ve changed clothes, eaten lunch, drunk a diet Coke, and sat here hitting refresh on my browser over and over, to no real end.

I must, however, get my act somewhat more together now, in order to pack.  It’s been a blissfully travel-free six weeks, but alas, it’s over.  Tomorrow, I leave for L.A. for a meeting, about which I’m really excited.  I come back here Wednesday, and then leave again Thursday for this.  (Yes, poor me.) Then back here Monday, and then off on Thursday once more for here.  (Life is very, very hard.) Then back again on Monday, at which point there will be something less than two weeks left before I load up the car and head back to California.

Trust me when I say that I’m not complaining about any of these trips, including the return to California.  It’s just how fast the time is going, and how quickly I know the next few weeks will speed by, that’s got me dragging my heels a bit, wanting nothing more than to stay put, right now.

I’m in the initial stages today of drafting an article that I’ve promised for a volume.  And I’m having no fun whatsoever.

The first day of drafting is always painful: I cobble together what few thoughts I have about the article’s structure into the beginnings of some kind of outline; I attempt to flesh out the outline where I can; I stare at the enormous gaps—particularly the big white space at the end of what I’ve got, where I just run out of steam and can’t figure out what comes next.

I check email.  I read blogs.

I look back at the outline, depressed to find that nothing has changed since I turned away from it ten minutes ago.  I force myself to produce another bullet point.  Then delete it.  Then put it back, as I’m not sure what else to put in its place.

I check various stats.  See if there’s new email.  Get another diet Coke.

The first day is always like this—I spend less time working than stalling, trying to avoid having to bash my forehead into that brick wall one more time.  The first day’s work is nearly always nonsense.

Sometimes the second day’s work is, too.

But often on the second day, and usually by the third, something breaks loose, and I actually begin to feel the shape of whatever it is I’m writing, producing actual sentences with real logical connections to one another, sensing that those logical connections are gradually building into something that will someday resemble an argument.

Usually.  Unless it turns out that what I produced on the first day really was nonsense, and that I just don’t have enough to work with to propel me through.

I try to remind myself that that’s a pretty rare outcome.  But I still keep hoping that beginning to draft something new will get easier, someday.

A very interesting post today by Jill Walker on institutional repositories, their benefits, and the ways that they fall short of the ideal networked publication archive she’d like.  There’s of course a key difference between the repository and the kind of publishing environment that I’m imagining in ElectraPress—the repository is a somewhat secondary storage facility for the publications of a cluster of scholars, rather than a primary locus of publishing in and of itself—but I think there’s still much to consider in the issues that Jill raises.

Partially just a couple of links for my benefit; partially stuff I’d like to discuss further at a less-rushed moment:

Wendy Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT Press, 2006).

Robert Frenay, Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things (FSG, 2006).

Henry over at Crooked Timber posted over the weekend about Yochai Benkler’s new book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, which has just been released by Yale University Press.  Benkler has also made the book available in PDF format, and has created a wiki for the text, allowing for a different kind of interaction between readers and this text:

The basic idea is to make this Wiki a place where people who read the book can do at least four things. First, collaborate on writing a summary of the ideas and claims of the book, as an initial point of entry. Second, provide an easy platform through which to access underlying research materials: both those used in the book’s notes, and more importantly, resources that are useful for further research, refinement, and updating. Third, the Wiki should be a place where participants can describe, link to, and analyze examples of the phenomena the book describes. The purpose is not to “make the case” for the book or find “gotcha” counter examples. What we are trying to do is provide a real research tool, annotated bibliography, and platform for collaborative learning. Examples and counter-examples should be selected and described with that purpose in mind. Fourth, the Wiki is itself a learning platform about what is valuable in a learning platform. Through separate pages devoted to ideas and experiments of what can be done with an online book to make it a learning platform, we hope to expand the range of uses to which this Wiki can be available.

In certain ways, a wiki is of course the ideal format for such a project, allowing as it does for multiple, collaborative authorship and a relatively boundless expansion.  But the wiki seems also to maintain a separation between the primary text and its related paratexts—here are the static PDFs from which the author speaks, and here are the malleable wiki pages on which readers chime in.  One of the questions I’m pondering as we move forward with the ElectraPress project is how we might imagine bringing those voices into closer conversation.