Here’s where I’ve been, and where I’ll continue to be for a bit yet:

• Due early last week: invites to speakers for spring symposium; completed.
• Due late last week: a chunk of grading for both of my classes; completed. (At least until the next chunk of grading, which is coming due soon.)
• Due last Friday: a response to a set of reviews of my book (coming soon to a blog post near you); completed.
• Due Monday: my assigned chunks of a big grant narrative being jointly written with some colleagues; completed (but the entire thing will need some putting together and polish yet).
• Due Monday: a big, high-stakes internal proposal on behalf of my program; completed (though may need revision).
• Due Monday: student letter of recommendation number 1; completed.
• Due Monday: book review for new online publication (about which more later); still reading the book.
• Due next week: student letters of recommendation numbers 2 and 3; not yet begun.
• Due by the end of next week: a very significant review letter for a colleague at another institution; reading in progress but writing not yet begun.
• Due week after next: a letter of recommendation for a former student applying for a grant; not even on the radar screen yet.
• Due sometime very shortly after that: a peer review for a journal; barely even on the list of priorites at the moment.

And this of course does not even begin to account for little things like, say, preparing to teach my classes tomorrow, or doing the reading I need to get done for a small research colloquium I’m participating in.

I’m going back under. See you when I next get to breathe.

I just got the following email message from a colleague on the far side of the country, with whom I actually haven’t been in contact in at least four or five years:

Hi, Kathleen–

I hope you’re well. I wanted to tell you that I just received a great packet from V.U.P. (with a color copy of the book jacket) hawking your book for my classes on lit. & technology, where it would indeed be a good fit. I’m requesting an examination and can’t wait to read it. The press seems to be promoting it energetically–a nice surprise, from an academic publisher.

I think I’m even more surprised than he is. I’ve been afraid for a while now that — well, the book’s been out for over a year, and I was afraid it had run its course. Reviews are yet to appear, naturally, given the painful slowness of academic publishing cycles, but I was quite afraid that the book was drifting into backlist senescence. Needless to say, I’m thrilled to know that the publisher is not only keeping it in active circulation, but marketing it smartly. To echo my colleague’s subject line: Vandy rocks!

The Chronicle covers the Institute for the Future of the Book’s release of CommentPress this week. Overall, it’s a strong article, though with a pretty unfortunate headline.

From my friends at the Institute for the Future of the Book today comes the launch of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s new book-in-progress, The Googlization of Everything. Siva, who is the Institute’s first Fellow, is writing this book in public in an attempt, as he says, to open the “black box” of its production, a project that MediaCommons likewise has at its heart:

I have never tried to write a book this way. Few have. Writing has been a lonely, selfish pursuit for my so far. I tend to wall myself off from the world (and my loved ones) for days at a time in fits and spurts when I get into a writing groove. I don’t shave. I order pizza. I grumble. I ignore emails from my mother.

I tend to comb through and revise every sentence five or six times (although I am not sure that actually shows up in the quality of my prose). Only when I am sure that I have not embarrassed myself (or when the editor calls to threaten me with a cancelled contract – whichever comes first) do I show anyone what I have written. Now, this is not an uncommon process. Closed composition is the default among writers. We go to great lengths to develop trusted networks of readers and other writers with whom we can workshop – or as I prefer to call it because it’s what the jazz musicians do, woodshed our work.

Well, I am going to do my best to woodshed in public. As I compose bits and pieces of work, I will post them here. They might be very brief bits. They might never make it into the manuscript. But they will be up here for you to rip up or smooth over.

That’s the thing. For a number of years now I have made my bones in the intellectual world trumpeting the virtues of openness and the values of connectivity. I was an early proponent of applying “open source” models to scholarship, journalism, and lots of other things.

And, more to the point: One of my key concerns with Google is that it is a black box. Something that means so much to us reveals so little of itself.

So I would be a hypocrite if I wrote this book any other way. This book will not be a black box.

Join in the discussion of the text as it develops there. I hope that the folks at MediaCommons can also discuss the implications of that text’s development; what can we learn from Siva’s experiment with writing-in-public?

I’m utterly flabbergasted by this story, from the afternoon update of the Chronicle of Higher Education:

MIT Student Sporting Circuit-Board Artwork Is Arrested in Airport Bomb Scare

Police officers arrested an MIT student at gunpoint this morning when they thought she was carrying a bomb into Logan International Airport, The Boston Globe reported.

The student, 19-year-old Star Simpson, walked into the airport at 8 a.m. with a circuit board affixed to the front of her sweatshirt. The circuit board displayed green LED lights and trailed wires running to a 9-volt battery. When an airport employee asked her about it, she did not respond, the Globe said. Police officers wielding machine guns quickly surrounded her. They determined that her prop was harmless, but arrested her for possessing a hoax device and for disturbing the peace.

The back of Ms. Simpson’s sweatshirt said, in gold handwritten letters, “socket to me” and “Course VI,” the nickname for the program in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, the Globe reported. She told the police that her garment was an art project.

“I’m an inventor, artist, engineer, and student,” Ms. Simpson says on her MIT Web site. “I love to build things, and I love crazy ideas.”

Law-enforcement authorities weren’t too crazy about her latest idea. “I’m shocked and appalled that somebody would wear this type of device to an airport,” Maj. Scott Pare of the Massachusetts State Police told the Globe. “Thankfully because she followed our instructions,” he said, “she ended up in our cell instead of a morgue.” —Sara Lipka

Thankfully? My assumption is that Ms. Simpson is the one who is meant, in this statement, to be thankful, displaying an appropriate level of gratitude for not having been shot for wearing a sweatshirt with flashing lights on it. Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the question of whether a battery-operated sweatshirt constitutes a “hoax device,” and therefore whether Ms. Simpson should have ended up in that cell at all (though I’m compelled to ask whether my grandmother would be arrested for disturbing the peace if she attempted to enter Logan Airport while wearing her Christmas sweatshirt on which Rudolph’s nose blinks). What I really want to know is in what universe would an actual bomb-carrying terrorist go through airport security with a prominently displayed, flashing-lighted circuit board attached to his or her chest?

That this story exists at all seems to me prima facie evidence that “they hate us for our freedom” is cynical, disingenuous nonsense. Perhaps they, whoever they are, hate us because our state apparatus is willing to shoot its own citizens for wearing a piece of blinking circuitry, which, if you ask me, is pretty much the opposite of freedom, thanks.

An odd assortment of things:

1. I’ve intended, since they were released, to buy an iPhone as soon as my contract with my current non-AT&T wireless company expired. I’ve been operating for the last couple of months under the misimpression that said contract expires on October 14, and so have been imagining myself fully under the influence of the koolaid within another three weeks. I discovered this morning, however, that that was just the date I became eligible, for whatever reason, for a discounted phone upgrade with my current provider; the contract itself doesn’t expire until December 14. The good news is that this gives Apple another couple of months to go ahead and release the second-generation upgrade which always seems to follow on the heels of a price drop.

2. I just got an email from Continental, offering me the opportunity to get a Sony e-book reader in exchange for 5000 frequent flyer miles. Considering that I’ve got FFMs out the wazoo, I bit, despite my (a) general dislike of such proprietary, single-use devices, (b) specific annoyance at anything playing on the notion of the e-book, and (c) very particular vows never to support Sony technologies. Curiosity got the better of me, as well as the knowledge that those 5000 miles are unlikely to mean the difference between going to Europe and not going to Europe any time soon.

3. I’m contemplating some serious software upgrades, and trying to decide where to begin. I definitely want to upgrade iWork, as I love both Keynote and Pages (the new version of which I understand plays better with Word), and am curious about Numbers. I’m debating upgrading iLife, mostly for the upgraded iPhoto, but am a little less certain that’s necessary. Both of those are pretty cheap, though; the big question is whether I upgrade my current Adobe CS2/Macromedia Studio MX suite to Adobe CS3. And if so, which package? If any of you have upgraded, and have thoughts about what’s worth it and what’s not, I’d love to hear them…

Is another three hours in the day, only available for reading and writing. No meetings, no meals, no phone calls, no email. Preferably — and this will no doubt make me sound like even more of a misanthrope than I actually am — no human contact at all. Three hours in which one is somehow protected from everything else, closed into one’s monastery cell (though a comfy cell, with a good reading chair) with only books and the writing apparatus of one’s choice.

Of course, if I’m being honest, what I really need is the focus to be able to use such a magically protected three hours wisely. Off to go make the best of the 28 minutes I do have…

Seriously: forget April.

September hereabouts brings together the end of summer (as in the always-insane beginning of the fall semester, in which the red [i.e., meetings] takes over my iCal) with the onset of the worst of summer (as in temperatures verging on 110 degrees). Fortunately, the heat wave of the first week of classes didn’t last long, and things are actually quite nice now, weather-wise. But I am just barely hanging on in terms of keeping up with the deadlines that are coming fast and furious, keeping my classes up to speed, keeping a handle on my physical well-being. Already, two weeks into the semester, I’m waking up exhausted every single morning.

I should know by now that this is just the way things are, that the semester always starts more painfully than I expect, but somehow I keep thinking to myself that this year will be different, that I’ll be better organized, that I’ll be able to keep up with the projects I started over the summer, that — imagine this — I’ll still have thoughts interesting enough to bother with blogging. Needless to say, that hasn’t happened this year, but I’m trying to remain positive: perhaps the second half of September will be better, once the end of summer is really met by the onset of fall.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education today comes an announcement of a report conducted by the University of California’s Office of Scholarly Communication that indicates that, generally, scholars accept the notion of innovative modes of electronic publishing in theory, but remain resistant in actual practice. According to the Chron, the report concludes that “the UC faculty largely conform to conventional behavior regarding scholarly communication, such as publishing in traditional venues, but widely express a need for change in the current systems of scholarly communication.” Such resistance seems to stem from fears that new modes of publishing might undermine the quality or value of scholarship.

At the same time, however, the report suggests that the force for innovation is coming from what its authors consider to be some surprising locations: according to the Chron, “identifies ‘more appetite for change among faculty in arts and humanities than within the social sciences, life and medical sciences, or the physical sciences.’ And it concludes that senior professors are often ‘more open to innovation than younger faculty.’”

So, the perennial question: how do we bridge the theory-practice divide? How do we translate the recognition of a need for change into actual change? How do we get those open-minded senior professors to make clear to their departments and their administrations that such changes are positive, that the quality of scholarship can in fact improve if institutions are open to innovation? And, most importantly perhaps, how do we get those institutions to convey to junior faculty — and to stand by those assurances — that new modes of publishing are not just valid, but valued?