Recovering today after a quite wonderful MLA. I got to meet several people that I’d been hoping to introduce myself to for a while, I got to catch up with some old friends, and I got to attend and participate in a number of fantastic panels. Conferences always make me eager to be back in front of my computer, though, processing the ideas that have come up and putting together my own thoughts. So I’m off to do some of that processing now; I’ll hope to have exciting new stuff to share here soon.

The last few days have been a blur of travel and family, all of which I survived, though not without some bumps along the way. I’m happily ensconced in my hotel room in Chicago now, though, awaiting what promises to be the most action-packed MLA I’ve experienced.*

If you’re around and want to say hi, you can likely find me at many of the various panels thoughtfully put together by the Association for Computers and the Humanities**, including of course my own. I’ll hope to see some of you there.

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*Not counting MLAs at which I’ve conducted interviews, I guess, but those are hard for me to characterize as action-packed, really, as sitting in a hotel room talking for hours on end hardly strikes me as action.

**[Updated, 12.27.07, 9.34 am: I must have been more tired than I thought I was last night. The panels themselves have been put together by various entities, only one of which is ACH; the list of panels was collated by ACH. Sheesh.]

I received a very nice and fairly apologetic note today, informing me that I was not elected to the Delegate Assembly of the MLA.

This is one of those cases when saying “it’s an honor just to have been nominated” really, really applies. Though I’m not entirely sure that the “just” is in the right place.

The real beauty part of having teeny tiny little classes, as I’ve always suspected but never really gotten to experience, is that grading goes fast. One can zip through everything in a day or two, and get on with the important business of one’s life. Like, say, finishing that paper you have to give in nine days that still isn’t quite done. Or, perhaps, packing for the holiday trip that suddenly begins tomorrow for which you are entirely unprepared. Or even remembering what it feels like to write a blog entry about nothing in particular.

Let the break begin! I hope yours is as good as mine is promising to be.

So a pal of mine has just drawn my attention to an interesting article in the L.A. Times from about ten days or so ago on responses to the Kindle. The article attempts to look fairly neutrally at the object itself, what it gets right and what it gets wrong, as well as at the responses to the object.

The most interesting parts of the article, for my purposes, are the anti-Kindle screeds on the part of those who would defend the print-on-paper codex from all apparent technological threats. And the absolute best part of that is the response by Jonathan Franzen.

You’d think Franzen would have learned to keep his mouth shut (and email unsent) around reporters.

As Aunt B. has already pointed out, he manages to make an utter fool of himself by insisting that the only way to truly experience Shakespeare is to read it in print, as was originally intended. But my favorite line of Franzen’s is this one:

“Am I fetishizing ink and paper? Sure, and I’m fetishizing truth and integrity too.”

Because pixels are some sneaky lying little bastards.

Sigh,
KF

I’ve just found out that The Anxiety of Obsolescence has been named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2007 by CHOICE, the publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

Now that is a nice note to end the semester on.

Every semester has an emblematic moment. This semester’s finally arrived today, in the moment when, walking along talking with the dean, I stumbled on a bit of uneven sidewalk and completely face-planted on the pavement.

Falling gets harder every year after 30, I think; one has both come to assume one’s verticality to be stable, given, and lost some degree of the flexibility that makes sudden changes negotiable. Actually, I think both states might be summed up in the term “dignity,” and boy, is mine bruised.

I keep reliving the moment, and its aftermath: turning to look in the direction the dean had just pointed, turning back to ask a question, feeling my toe hit the obstruction, and that clear interval in which I knew I was going down, but had not yet hit. And then: lying on my back on the sidewalk, saying “oh, shit” and trying to start breathing again; seeing the dean’s quite evident shock and concern as he asked whether I had hit my head; attempting to reassure the two students who stopped to see if we needed help and offered to call security. Then limping off to the meeting I’d been heading toward.

I’m banged up, though nothing is more bruised than my pride, I think, with the exception of the notebook I was carrying and the sunglasses I was wearing, each of which has a pretty good case of road rash. I don’t want to make too much of this, but it’s awfully hard not to feel like there’s something allegorical in this moment.

Amazon Kindle: My Writing Machines class spent a fair chunk of the week of its release discussing the Kindle, the things that make it cooler than the Sony Reader (wireless connectivity; rudimentary search and annotations), the things that make it as dumb as if not dumber than the Sony Reader (boneheaded DRM; a device so single-use that its EVDO can only be used to interact with one website; very restricted ability to interact with/comment upon/discuss texts; a pay model for delivery of material freely available on the web; and perhaps most superficially, but extremely important, an ugly design with counter-intuitive button placement that leaves no way to casually hold and interact with the device), and what we’d like to see in the future.

On that last, I’ve heard whisperings about of a sub-notebook Apple computer, to be announced at MacWorld in January; some of those whispers have even used the word “tablet.” A super-portable machine such as that with the full spectrum of network capabilities seems to me far more likely than the Kindle to be the preferred digital reading device of the future. Amazon may well have wanted to emulate the iPod in releasing a dedicated book-player, but they might have done better to consider the ways that the iPod has developed into the iPhone and the iPod Touch, and the ways that the highly wired users that they’re after have responded.

R. and I are just finishing up a long weekend away, spent in a very low-key way, if not exactly in a very low-key place, mostly holed up in a hotel working. I’ve gotten a good bit done — about two-thirds of my MLA presentation is now written (though it will need revising, no doubt, when that last third turns out to be twice as long as it ought to be), and I’ve done some reading I needed to do. It’s been a pretty blissful few days, in that regard, a brief flash of what it’s like to have an intellectual life that I have some kinds of control over.

Today, however, will be all about preparations for tomorrow: getting notes together for class, commenting on student work, and so forth. We’re into the home stretch now, with three more weeks of classes ahead of us. But in those three weeks there will also be four job candidate visits, plus advising and pre-registration for spring — oh, god, and then there’s spring, and I haven’t ordered my books yet, and…

I am trying not to feel the panic of time marching forward, trying to remember what these five days felt like, and further to remember that there are five weeks between finals and the start of next semester, and that I’ll have this kind of freedom to focus on my own work for the majority of that break. In the meantime, however, there’s other stuff to be done.

My friends at the University of California Press and the California Digital Library project last week launched a beta version of the Mark Twain Project, an astonishing archive bringing together more than 2300 of Twain’s letters, painstakingly edited and catalogued, all searchable, with a robust citation-saving feature. The project will in the future include editions of Twain’s published writing as well.

From the press release:

Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO) applies innovative technology to more than four decades of archival research by expert editors at the Mark Twain Project. It offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents.

MTPO is a joint undertaking of the Mark Twain Papers and Project, the California Digital Library, and University of California Press. It is funded in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the Mark Twain Project, and is supported by a number of institutions and individuals. The Mark Twain Foundation, a perpetual charitable trust that possesses the publication rights to all of Mark Twain’s writings, has given UC Press and Mark Twain Project Online exclusive rights to publish copyright-protected writings by Mark Twain, both in print and electronically.

At beta launch, the site will include more than twenty-three hundred letters written between 1853 and 1880, including nearly 100 facsimiles of originals. Users will also be able to search for information about Mark Twain’s complete correspondence across his entire life, including letters to him and his family. In future years, the site will release more of the nearly ten thousand known letters, including many never-before published; electronic editions of many of Mark Twain’s most famous literary works; the most complete catalog of Mark Twain’s writings currently available; and, in 2010, Mark Twain’s Autobiography, never before published in its complete form…

The customizable interface provides a powerful reading and research experience. The site offers users unprecedented access to authoritative transcriptions of Mark Twain’s writings and to compare those transcriptions side by side with facsimiles when available. Researchers can gather and store digital citations and links to selected documents, images, and other resources. These features are supported, in large part, by the California Digital Library’s eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) and the ongoing work of The Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI).

This project is of a kind that seems to me ideally suited for digital publishing; the costs of producing this kind of reference material in print couldn’t be justified by many presses, resulting in a multi-volume library-oriented set that would be much too expensive for most individual readers. Beyond that, however, the material itself becomes much more useful when it’s manipulable by the researcher (see, for instance, Scott Eric Kaufman’s early experience of the archive), and when the archive itself can grow as such research continues. I’ll be looking forward to seeing how the project develops from here.