My technologies are suddenly making me very nervous. Yesterday, at the end of a very long and stressful day, I came home and found my laptop open — I was quite convinced I’d closed it before leaving — and Skype running on the screen. And I absolutely know that I had not been running Skype before I left. Now, granted, I had a conference call earlier in the day, one we’d hoped to conduct that way, but one member of the group wasn’t Skype-able, so we ended up using phones. And I was in the office. Could somebody attempting to Skype me when I didn’t have the program running have triggered it to start up? It’s either that or the cats are chatting when I’m not home, because I choose not to think about any other alternatives.

Then, just now, I came into my office to drop some stuff off after class, and used the speakerphone to dial down and see if a colleague was in his office. And noticed that the red light labeled “MIC” was lit on the phone. Which it has never ever been before. And when I hung up from the speakerphone call, the display was flashing “MIC.” And so now I’m just paranoid enough to wonder whether somebody could have turned on the microphone in my desk telephone for nefarious purposes.

As if that’s not enough, I now have to go check on my program’s library, which somebody apparently attempted to break into yesterday. I could really stand it if the world gave me a little less to be nervous about.

I’m still uncertain about the header; it may change yet, but I’m pretty happy with the rest. Do let me know if you find anything weird. (I mean, things I’ve overlooked, not things you don’t like.)

So the twittery updates have started bugging me; I’m going to test out the daily digest option for a few days, and if that still bugs me, I’ll move to the sidebar option.

That’s thing one. Thing two is that I’ve decided I’m officially getting old. How I know this is that this teeny little font is bugging the hell out of me. So I think there may be a CSS redesign in my relatively near future (as soon as I’ve gotten enough real work done that I can justify some goofing off, that is). Stand by, as there’ll no doubt be bumps along the way.

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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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…