While I certainly agree that reports of the ‘death of the novel’ have been greatly exaggerated, and anxieties about new media technologies and the threats they allegedly pose to literature may reflect fears about larger societal changes, it is difficult to accept the conclusion that critiques of technology always function as covert attacks against identity politics. (Enns)

When I first read Anthony Enns’ extremely long review of my book, published early in March on electronic book review, my initial thought was that he just hadn’t read it very closely, and therefore mistook carefully qualified claims for gross generalizations. But gradually it began to dawn on me: his review may be less a misreading than an enactment of precisely the anxious response that I outline in the book. It’s the best explanation I can come up with for the many conflations, reductions, and misinterpretations in the review: I think I touched a nerve.

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• Staying home in your pajamas on a Tuesday morning feels like playing hooky, even if you’re doing it in order to read a senior thesis. #

It’s prospie season, round these parts, and the campus is full of admitted students and their families, who are going to various panel discussions, browsing through department fairs, and attending classes. Both of my classes this morning were prospieful — 7 or 8 in Intro to Digital Media Studies, and something like 20 in Race, Gender, and Science Fiction. It’s great seeing the excitement of these students as they’re pondering the possibilities ahead of them — and it’s particularly nice seeing it right now, with three and a half weeks to go in what’s been a long, hard spring. That’s one of the beauties of this environment, if you ask me: a continual sense of renewal, of looking forward.

The other joy is the return; alumni weekend is in a couple of weeks, and — at least according to the alumni association’s “who’s coming?” list — several of my former students should be showing up. The class of 2003 is a particularly important one to me; they were first-years in my second year here, so they were the first class in which I was assigned advisees. Their first year was also the one and only time I’ve had the opportunity to teach our first-year seminar, and though that class was in some ways a deeply painful one (not least due to its 8.20 am time slot), something like six out of the fifteen students in the class became my advisees, and the seminar itself later morphed into the Race, Gender, and Science Fiction class I’m now teaching.

It’s the circle of academic life, I guess, or something else equally schmaltzy, but boy the sentimentalist in me just loves these moments…

I’ve edited my feeds (RSS, RSS2, RDF, and atom) such that posts generated by the Twitter Tools plugin are excluded from my feeds. Let me know if you spot anything odd…

• Testing out the code for excluding twitterings imported to my blog from my RSS feed… #

• Ikea sez a new sofa may be all I need. If only it were so. #
• How does one go about thickening one’s skin, exactly? #

• Classes went well, faculty meeting was survivable, and now the last minute of office hours is ticking to a close. Wednesday, complete. #
• Wishing I had something more interesting to report than that I got a good night’s sleep. But really, I feel like a whole new person. #

What I was tinkering with yesterday was Twitter Tools, a plugin for WordPress that connects your blog and your Twitter account, allowing you do a range of things like have your twitterings (I really can’t bring myself to use the word “tweets”) appear in your sidebar, notify Twitter when you post something to the blog, etc. What I’ve done is create a special category, “twitter,” which gathers my twitterings and posts them to the front page, but in a special format that sets them a bit apart. I’m going to let this run a while and see how I feel about it; if it’s too annoying, I may move to a daily digest posting.

Now to pretend to real productivity.

• @chutry Maybe we should set up an exchange; you read mine and I’ll read yours. That way they’ll all be new and different! #

Doing a bit of tinkering in the background here, so things may look a bit odd at moments. Carry on.